


Skybound

by nickel710



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Class and Aspect, Ectobiology, Gen, M/M, Slow Build, Worldbuilding, but no trolls, caste system based on Aspects, check chapter notes for trigger warnings, floating city, it was already getting unmanageable with just the kids, pre-modern society, sorry - Freeform, the kids are all here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-10-17 23:02:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 58,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10604106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickel710/pseuds/nickel710
Summary: Roxy Lalonde isn't just a Low Aspect and therefore Earthstuck; as a Void Aspect, she's one of the Corrupted castes. She's been riding on her bestie's coattails for a long time now, safe in his metaphorical shadow even as she lives uncomfortably in the literal shadow of the floating city of Skaia, where the Noble Aspects reign, unseen and distant. But she has plans. Mother-effin' aspirations, you dig? And those plans just happen to include regicide. She's skybound, with a trusty rifle, a heavy grudge, and half of an idea of how she'll pull it all off.





	1. Aspirations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _So here we are again_   
>  _It's always such a pleasure_
> 
> But actually, it is. Starting a new fic is always kinda exciting! And it's my first AU so I've been doing a lot of thinking and planning for this, it's nice to finally share some of it! Thanks to [nimagine](http://nimagine.tumblr.com/) for bouncing ideas and helping me develop this world! They're super cool and make lovely art and you should be friends with them imho.
> 
> Enjoy! I love Roxy so much.
> 
> OH! And happy 4/13! It's my first 4/13 as a Homestuck. Good timing for this fic to come into being, eh?

Roxy Lalonde lay in the soft summer grass outside the city, hands cradling her head, and stared up at the floating city of Skaia. The city’s shadow was currently blotting out the sun above her, thereby providing shade and enabling her comfort on an otherwise hot afternoon. As she gazed at the vague shapes that constituted the bottom of the floating metropolis, she wondered where exactly, among the many skyscrapers and parks and palaces of Skaia, was the home of the Empress?

Of course, Roxy had never _been_ to Skaia, because she was a Void Aspect, and Void was a Low Aspect, so she was Earthstuck. So she speculated about the location of the Empress, one eye closed and tongue caught between her teeth as she held up a thumb to cover different areas of Skaia up in her view.

She liked to pretend the Empress’s palace was right there in the middle of the city; that would make some kind of sense, right? If _Roxy_ were some fancy Life Aspect who ruled the world or whatever, she would build her palace in the dead center of the floating metropolis. It was very symbolic.

Then again, perhaps the center of Skaia was where the High Priestess’s temple was.

She sighed. She’d find out one day, mark her words. She was determined to get to Skaia, and soon.

“I’m coming for you, Betty,” she said, lifting her other hand up, holding an imaginary rifle. She even squinted as if looking down a long sniper’s scope, “aiming” right at the heart of Skaia, then she pantomimed pulling the trigger. As she imitated a rifle’s recoil with her hands and arms, she simultaneously mimicked the loud, echoing crack of a gunshot. “Your ass is grass, bitch.”

 

“Diiiiirk,” Roxy groaned, sitting behind her best friend as he fiddled with his latest wooden model. It was too early in the process for Roxy to tell what he was making. “Come on, are you even listening?”

“I’m trying to focus, Rox,” he said distractedly. Roxy rolled her eyes, kicking her feet back and forth from her seat on the bench like a child.

“Focus on _me_ for a minute,” she said.

Dirk sighed, carefully twisting a dowel into place, then looked up at her. “What?”

“I was _asking_ ,” she started pointedly, “if that Hope guy had been around again. The cute one, you know… what’s his name, with the muscles and funky accent.”

“Jake,” Dirk supplied.

“Yes! Jake. Has he been down from Skaia again?”

Dirk shook his head. “No. Which is something you'd know if you paid attention to your official duties more often.” Roxy made a face, rolling her eyes. Dirk just shrugged and continued, “But, I did get this today.” He handed Roxy a green and gold envelope, then turned his attention back to his project while she read.

> _  
> Dear Prince Strider,_
> 
> _Please expect my presence on the seventh of July. My shuttle ought arrive at seven of the clock in the morning. By order of Her Imperial Majesty, please arrange transport for me from the shuttle station to the Seat of Spirit, where we shall discuss matters vital to the ongoing establishment of order in your city._
> 
> _I look forward to my visit,_
> 
> _Sincerely yours,_
> 
> _Page of Hope Jake English_  
>  Skaian Ambassador to Earth  
>  Messenger of Her Imperial Majesty, Sylph Betty Crocker  
>    
> 

“The seventh is tomorrow!” Roxy said indignantly as she stuffed the short missive back into its envelope.

“I know,” Dirk sighed.

“Nice of them to give you warning,” she grumbled as she tossed the envelope onto Dirk’s desk.

“At least they _did_ give me warning this time,” he replied, sitting up straight again and returning the pliers he had been using while Roxy read to their proper place in his toolbox. “Remember the second time English visited?”

“What a disaster,” Roxy agreed, remembering how nobody had bothered to tell Dirk—or anyone, for that matter—that the Empress was sending her personal messenger. English himself was rather kind about the whole affair, but the fallout once news traveled back to Skaia that Betty’s own ambassador had been made to wait for hours before being acknowledged by the Seat…. Poor Dirk had been forced to work very hard to regain the Empress’s favor after that.

That was about a year ago now, and since then, English had been to visit four more times.

“Lucky for you English has a thing for your hot bod,” Roxy continued, grinning.

Dirk rolled his eyes, then stood. “Come on, I have to go finish up some reports. Gonna be a late night since I have to fucking rearrange my whole schedule tomorrow for that halfwit. Do your job for once and help me out so I can get some sleep.”

Roxy waited while Dirk pulled on his crimson robe with its crowned heart sigil in golden embroidery, the mark of his official station as the Seat of Spirit, which was a fancy way to say “governor of the unlucky Earthstuck sots and wretches.” He had inherited the Seat entirely because of his Class/Aspect combination. Heart was the highest caste among the Low Aspects, and Prince was the second highest of all the Classes. Only a Seer of Heart would outrank Dirk among the Earthstuck, and no Seer of Heart had been born in several generations.

Dirk slipped on his gold and crimson shoes, then glanced regretfully around his workshop. Roxy knew the look—Dirk would have preferred a life of tinkering to one of ruling. Heavy the crown, etc., etc.

“Aw, cheer up, Di-Stri!” she said, slinging an arm around his shoulder as best she could despite their height difference. “It’s not like being a Blood or Mind would’ve freed you up to do this all the time.”

“We could have been born Noble,” Dirk pointed out as they stepped into the hallway and he shut the door to his workshop. “Then we could have done anything we wanted.”

Roxy rolled her eyes. “Yeah but we’d also be _Noble_ , which by default means we’d be pretentious assholes.” She paused, then patted his shoulder. “Never mind, that wouldn’t be a change for you. You’re right: dream big, Dirk.”

 

One very good thing about Dirk being the Seat was that when he had told everyone that Roxy, a lowly Rogue of Void, would be his Shadow, it was final. Despite the covetous glances and resentment that it fostered among others who were passed up for the position, Roxy was grateful for her job. Rogue of Void was a fairly uncommon Class/Aspect combo, but rarity didn’t make it valuable. If anything, Rogues of Void were among the most mistrusted of all Lows. Void was a slippery Aspect, and Rogue was not only the second-to-lowest of all Classes, it was also inherently about deception and stealth. Essentially, people saw Roxy’s Class/Aspect assignment as “slippery, lying shrew.”

But when the Prince of Heart put his foot down, only orders from Skaia could change his decision, and the Skaian government’s approach to Earth matters was, and Roxy was quoting official doctrine here, “as long as you don’t fuck it up, we don’t care.”

The _bad_ part about being Dirk’s Shadow was that Roxy found herself yawning and grumpy outside the shuttle station at 6:50 the following morning in her most uncomfortable formal attire. She was head of the envoy sent by Dirk to receive Page English, so she had to be dressed in her official robes—navy with her Void Aspect clasp on the lightweight summer cloak, and a chain of office around her neck with Dirk’s crowned heart sigil at the center. The authority granted to her by the chain of office superseded her low Class/Aspect, signaling that any orders she gave were essentially orders from the Seat himself.

“Rogue Lalonde,” began one of the others in her party, a Blood Aspect (maybe… Heir, Roxy thought?) who had been working for the Seat of Spirit since before Dirk had occupied the role. Roxy already felt bored just _looking_ at the dusty old woman. What was her name, Corinne? Bureaucrats, ugh. “Perhaps His Excellency would be better received if we were to move the delegation indoors.”

Roxy made sure to mutter some choice words _just_ within earshot as she pushed off from the wall she was leaning against to go inside. Carina and the rest of her entourage strategically didn’t hear the Shadow’s grumbling.

Inside was dim and boring and not nearly as nice as the morning-sunny garden they had been standing in. Like most Void Aspects, Roxy preferred the expansive outdoors—the more open the space, the better. Being inside buildings could feel so… stifling.

They didn’t have to wait long for the ambassador’s shuttle to arrive. Roxy was inspecting her midnight blue summer cloak—a showy garment worn almost entirely behind her rather than over her shoulders, meant solely to make her look impressive—when she heard a deep, booming voice call her name.

“Roxy, dear gal!”

Roxy grinned, flinging the cloak back into place as she turned to greet English. As Nobles went, English wasn’t too bad. She was maybe even a _little_ fond of the man, and not even only because Dirk had an unhealthy affection for him. Page of Hope was barely even Noble at all.

“How’s it hanging, English?” she said, watching for Karen’s grimace from the corner of her eye. The woman did not disappoint.

Jake chuckled at the informal greeting as he swept her up into a big hug. “It’s really smashing of you to come personally to escort me back to the Seat,” he said, giving her one last squeeze before returning her to her feet. She brushed out her clothes so they wouldn’t wrinkle. “I must say, Her Majesty was _insistent_ that I formally request escort this time.”

“Old Betty still hasn’t gotten over that one time?” Roxy said, looking over the small crew of servants following Jake, a group of Signless Aspects. To call the Signless “Aspects” at all was deceiving; they were the 0.05% of the population who were born with no discernible Class or Aspect. The Nobles permitted them to live on Skaia as a servant caste, and besides a few lowly Pages like Jake, they were the only Skybound who ever set foot on Earth. This group of eight Signless were bearing Jake’s luggage and boxes of what Roxy knew would be gifts for Dirk.

“Ah—no, she hasn’t, nor do I think she’d take a shine to being called ‘Old Betty!’” Jake said, frowning. Oh shit. Roxy mentally kicked herself. Jake might be one of the cooler Nobles, but she could probably be put to death for calling the Empress something like that in front of him.

She glanced at Katrina, whose disapproving scowl stretched for miles, then looped her hand into Jake’s arm and pulled him apart from the group. When Karly started to speed up to follow her, Roxy waved her hand in a dismissive gesture at the woman. “We’ve got some very official Ambassador–Shadow business to discuss. Privately,” she hissed. Carla’s frown managed to get bigger, but she did not dare cross Roxy’s direct wish. 

Roxy turned to start the trek back to where their carriage waited, steering Jake toward the door. On Skaia, apparently carriages were powered by low-ranking Breath and Space Aspects, similar to the shuttles that went from Skaia to Earth daily to transport messages and goods. On Earth, people still used horse-drawn carriages for intra-city travel. Steam locomotives now connected most cities, though, and Roxy knew Dirk was keen on having engineers find ways to make steam a power source for carriages and other smaller, daily-use devices.

“I say,” Jake said, letting her lead him out of the shuttle station, “what private business is this?”

Roxy guided him through the garden toward the road where the carriages waited. “Nah, I just can’t stand the hovering sycophants,” she said, smiling as the warmth of the sun started to soak into her skin. It was still early enough that the daily eclipse from Skaia’s shadow had not begun.

Jake chuckled, then, shaded his eyes to look up at Skaia. He sighed. “It’s always so strange to see it from down here,” he said wistfully. “Really makes a fella feel small!”

“Do you like traveling to Earth, Jake?” Roxy asked, her own gaze also turned skyward.

“Hmm? Oh, I suppose. So many Skybound have such backwards notions about what Earth is like! I don’t mind it though. I’ve even tried to get Janey to come with me so she can see it’s nothing like she thinks, but…” he trailed off with another sigh.

“Janey? You mean Her Highness, Jane Crocker? The Maid of Life?”

“The very same!” Jake said with a proud grin down at Roxy.

Roxy’s mind was whirring, ideas forming. Schemes, man. Schemes. “So, you must be close to Her Highness, then?”

“I, well, yes, I am. I don’t mean to brag, but Jane is a dear friend!” He smiled. “She’s the one who recommended me to replace the old ambassador when he started getting too advanced in years to make frequent trips to Earth.” Roxy remembered the man. She had liked him about as much as she liked Kayla.

“Jane was adopted by the Empress, right?” Roxy probed. She knew the answer, but she wanted to butter Jake up a little. She gestured toward the carriage at the front of the line. Passersby craned their necks and stopped to ogle as Jake, in his golden Hope Aspect suit, gathered his long summer cape that hung from one shoulder by a golden chain, then stepped into the fancy carriage bearing Dirk’s crowned heart sigil in crimson. Shuttles with messages for Dirk or tradable goods for sale came everyday from Skaia, but actual Nobles were extremely rare.

Roxy followed Jake into the carriage and called for the driver to leave without waiting for Kathy to catch up.

“Well, of course,” Jake was saying in answer to Roxy’s question. “Life Aspects are _extremely_ rare, as I’m sure you know. Any Life Aspect is automatically adopted into the royal family. It’s traditional! A typical generation has one or two Life Aspects across the entire human race!”

Roxy nodded. She knew this. The vast majority of the population were the so-called Flesh castes: Blood and Mind. (Among the Nobles, Breath was the most common Aspect, though no one dared suggest Breath was also a Flesh caste.) Despite being so common, Blood and Mind were actually higher castes than Void, Doom, and Rage. These three lowest Aspects were collectively called the Corrupted castes, and people born into them were considered very unlucky.

Life and Light Aspects were the rarest of all, and considered the Elevated castes. Despite being somewhat more common than Life, Light Aspects were considered the highest caste. A holy caste, above reproach, unspeakably superior to every other human.

“But Her Majesty has been Empress for a long time now,” Roxy said. “Isn’t Her Highness Jane only in her twenties like us? Why isn’t there an older heir?”

“Inheritor,” Jake corrected. “It’s too confusing calling them heirs, what with Heir as a class and all. But yes, this is a quite commonly asked question! You see, Her Majesty is a Sylph of Life, a very powerful combination. She barely ages at all. In fact, despite having been the lady in charge of it all for more than eighty years, the Empress seems quite young. She has had three different Inheritors before Jane!”

“Really?” Roxy prompted, genuinely curious now. “What happened to them?”

“Well, the first was born at almost the same time as her, just one or two years later. A very rare occurrence, having two Life Aspects born so close together! He was a Knight of Life and when Her Majesty inherited the throne at the young age of six, her ‘brother’ became the Inheritor. The poor lad met an early end in a terrible accident not even three years later.”

Roxy had a hunch about that ‘terrible accident,’ but she didn’t say so.

“Her next Inheritor was born when Her Majesty was already thirty years into her rule. It was apparently quite a trying time, for the Empress to have no Inheritor for nearly three decades. The priests were in quite a tizzy trying to decide what to do about it! When Her Highness Felicity was born as a Witch of Life, everyone was very pleased. Felicity was alive when Jane was born, but fell sick and died not long after Jane’s adoption into the royal family.”

“What a shame,” Roxy said, tone controlled despite her desire to lace it with sarcasm. Here’s how Roxy reckoned it had gone down: Betty saw a less threatening Inheritor and undoubtedly had Felicity offed, just like the Knight of Life before her. Witches were almost an equal class to Sylphs, and Knights actually outranked Sylphs. Had either of those Inheritors been allowed to fully challenge Betty for the throne, she might have lost. But a Maid? Maid of Life was almost a joke—such a high Aspect, just to be a _Maid_.

“Indeed! I have heard the most wonderful things about Her Highness Felicity. But Jane will make a truly marvelous empress when she ascends.”

 _If she ever get the chance, maybe,_ Roxy thought. _She better hope no new Life babies are born until after Betty kicks the bucket._

“So does Jane get along with her?”

“The empress?” Jake asked. Roxy nodded, peeking out the window to see if they were getting close. Still another few minutes of carriage ride before they arrived to the Seat. She looked back at Jake just in time to see him school his face from a thoughtful frown to his usual cheerful demeanor. “I suppose so! I think the Empress is rather cruel to her, but Jane insists she’s just preparing her for the harsh reality of being in charge of an empire. I… well, who am I to doubt Her Highness?”

Roxy raised both eyebrows. Now _that_ was interesting. “Cruel?” she inquired.

Jake’s face shuttered. “Ah—it’d be swell of you to forget I said that,” he said a little nervously. “I could lose my job for such a disloyal statement!”

“Of course, chum,” Roxy said, using his word and eliciting a grin from the Page. Mentally, she filed the information away for future use. Sure, Jake was tolerable for a Noble, but Roxy wasn’t like Dirk. She didn’t forget that there was _no such thing as a good Noble._ She wouldn’t get Jake in trouble just for fun, but if the time came that having a little dirt on him would help her out… well, she had goals. Motherfuckin’ _aspirations_ , you dig?

Those goals just happened to include regicide.

 

Watching Dirk and Jake bumble around each other was only entertaining for so long. Like, seriously, can a girl just get to watch her bestie actually make a move on the hottie with a body from Skaia, or what? Apparently not. Instead she watched Dirk glance Jake’s way just a _little_ too frequently, the faint tinge that colored his cheeks when Jake laughed or clapped his shoulder. Fuck. She was kind of embarrassed on Dirk’s behalf. Not only did he have it bad for a Noble, he couldn’t even bring himself to make a damn move.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else to do right now but watch the two knuckleheads half-flirt. Custom and propriety dictated that no business be done between the Skaian ambassador and Earthly governor until the second day of Jake’s visit, so Roxy and Dirk had to spend the whole day entertaining the Page. The brightside: they didn’t have to entertain his entourage because no other Nobles were willing to be contaminated by coming down to Earth, and the Signless were just sent to the servant quarters, to be summoned again only when needed.

First, there was the exchanging of gifts. Dirk was presented with a series of very fancy cakes on even fancier platters from Jane, a new set of finely embroidered silk robes for formal affairs from the Empress herself, and a scaled down model of the Palace of Light. The last was easily Dirk’s favorite, and he spent a good half hour admiring the craftsmanship of the painted wooden model. Jake did not reveal whose gift this was, but he did hint that he had helped the sender select a proper and pleasing gift.

“It’s fucking amazing,” Dirk murmured, very gently running a finger over the golden peak of the palace’s central dome.

Roxy was also studying the model closely. “Have you ever been to the Palace of Light?” she asked Jake innocently. Her tone earned her a sharp, suspicious look from Dirk, but Jake didn’t notice.

“Oh, yes! I have accompanied Her Highness to the Palace of Light many times. Jane goes there every week for devotions, you see.”

Roxy smiled encouragingly. “Every week? So, is this model accurate?”

Jake nodded vigorously. “Absolutely! It’s a perfect model, down to the landscaping!”

Roxy’s smile widened. “Marvelous,” she said, turning her attention back to the ~~map~~ model in front of her. The Palace of Light wasn’t where the Empress lived, but if she visited even half as often as her Inheritor….

After a while, Dirk had servants take his gifts away to his personal quarters. Jake then surprised them by presenting Roxy with a gift from Jane, who had apparently heard many stories about the Shadow from Jake’s previous visits. “She thinks you sound wonderful,” Jake explained, “and thought it fitting to send a gift for the Seat’s most trusted advisor.”

Okay, now Roxy felt a _little_ bad for thinking earlier that she would throw Jake to the wolves if it meant she got her chance at Betty.

Jane’s gift to Roxy was a beautiful cat carved from jade, with gold and silver inlays. It was palm-sized and absolutely lovely, easily the single most precious item Roxy owned.

To Roxy’s surprise, Jake then called for a second present for her, from the same mysterious benefactor as Dirk’s final present.

It was a book, a thick, scholarly tome about Aspects and Classes. Roxy had never been a terribly attentive student when it came to learning about society and its divisions; while she excelled at mathematics and chemistry, she found it rather tedious to be given lessons on what she basically already knew, thanks to, you know… _living_.

She did find it odd that this gift-giver had found so savvy a present for Dirk and missed the mark so badly for Roxy. Regardless, she thanked Jake profusely before having both the cat figurine and the book taken back to her quarters.

Then it was Dirk’s turn to shower Jake with gifts. Dirk kept a stockpile of presents on hand for Jake’s visits; since the Empress’s Ambassador tended to drop by with little (or no) warning, he was careful to always be prepared with a handful of properly wasteful and opulent items.

This time around, Jake received a gift of beautiful pistols with intricately carved handles made of ivory, an ornamental pin with the Hope wings in stylized, artistic form, and a box-set of precious gems mined on Earth that were hard to get on Skaia.

This procedure of gift-giving and its traditional Humility Olympics (“no really, it was nothing; that robe from the Empress, though…” “think nothing of it, chap! A small thing, a small thing…”) was followed by a lazy riverboat lunch below the shade cast from Skaia, then a tour of the Seat’s personal library, and a banquet dinner.

When Roxy finally got away from the official state business (or really, officially sponsored state flirting, goddamn), she fell into her bed gratefully. But she was restless; soon enough, she was dressed in her favorite Rogue garb and out the window, climbing up to the roof to lay under the stars in the warm summer night. Those irons she’d been keeping in the fire… well, damn if they weren’t finally hot enough to take out and forge into real plans.

Hours into the night, the Void a comforting blanket overhead, Roxy schemed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Truth: I don't have much written of this, though the plot is clear. I honestly don't know how long it's going to be; I'd like it to end up between 5-8 chapters. But I almost always underestimate the number of chapters it'll take to get something done, so who knows.
> 
> But if past patterns hold, I'll probably be updating no more frequently than 2 times per week, and no less frequently than 2 times per month.
> 
> And yeah, if you're still waiting on Rebuild chapters... thanks for sticking with it! Those last two chapters are coalescing slowly but I think they'll be cool when they're done. I just wanted to start getting this little AU into form too! :)


	2. Resentment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Roxy figures out secrets and gets really angry.

While Dirk was attending to his duties with Jake the next day, Roxy was left to do all the boring shit Dirk usually did in a day. Honestly, he wanted to know why she shirked her official duties so often? Booooring.

Most of the day she succeeded in not paying a lot of attention to whatever it was being asked of her. Yes, she did want to sign off on a river rejuvenation project. No, she didn’t care about how much it was going to cost the city in taxpayer dollars. Yes, she did think the court’s decision to release that Bard of Doom from prison was the right choice. No, she would not be approving the development of the Doom Quarter Gardens into high-end shops for the neighboring Flesh communities, and she _especially_ didn’t care that Dirk had been considering the proposal and that she would be disappointing the merchants he had been talking to. Dirk was a horse’s ass, and yes, you could tell him she said so.

Honestly. _Bureaucrats._

While these decisions came and went, Roxy contemplated the plan she had developed the night before. It seemed solid enough, but the bigger problem was, how to sell it to Dirk? She’d need his help.

When the end of the day came, Roxy found Dirk and Jake in Dirk’s workroom. Dirk was showing Jake something on the model he had recently started.

Roxy stood in the doorway, watching as Jake studied the intricate little wooden pieces with fascination, and as Dirk stole glances at the look of wonderment on Jake’s handsome features. Her heart ached. A very small part of the ache was an old, familiar one that was mostly just the _memory_ of an ache, now: that little pang of regret that Dirk would never look at her the way he looked at Jake. But really, that particular heartache was kind of like an old stuffed toy from childhood to her now. Familiar, strangely comforting at times, but worn, faded, outgrown.

No, the heartache she felt watching Jake and Dirk came from something more adult than her childhood love for her best friend. This was a sense of betrayal, that Dirk had welcomed a _Noble_ into his inner sanctum, a place that had been _theirs_ and no one else’s for years now. This was an intrusion into their friendship, a weed taking root in their garden, and Dirk was not just allowing it, he had clearly openly encouraged it.

And then there was the pang of jealousy that overlaid it all. The Prince of Heart was about as close to Noble as he could get. Everyone desired him, apparently even an _actual_ Noble. Nobody desired Roxy. Had she ever been caught giving Jake the bedroom eyes Dirk was throwing at him, she’d have been flogged. A Rogue of Void wasn’t even desirable to other Corrupted caste members, not that she especially wanted to end up in love with some Maid of Doom or something.

Finally… the shame. For being a bad friend. Dirk obviously liked Jake, why couldn’t she be happy for them? She could share… couldn’t she?

_Not with a Noble._

She turned on her foot, silent and unnoticed. Perhaps had one of them been a Seer, they might have been able to spot her. But a Rogue of Void who didn’t want to be seen was easy to miss.

 

In her room, she threw off the chain of office that she had been wearing all day, feeling as though immeasurable weight were lifted from her shoulders instead of just the medallion. She scowled at the crowned heart at its center, a reminder of the best friend with whom she was currently quite upset. Stripping off her navy blue dress, she tossed it on top of the pendant, then fished out some more comfortable clothes. Black leggings. A navy tunic with the Void emblem stitched into its breast. Soft brown boots that tied high on her legs.

Rogue garb. A twisted sense of pride blossomed in her chest as she looked herself over in the mirror. She preferred to wear the signs of her stigmata clearly; let someone _dare_ to spit on her.

As she turned to climb out her window again, not wanting to have to answer the door if Dirk came to ask why she hadn’t joined him and Jake for supper, her eye fell on the fancy book Jake had given her yesterday. She frowned at it, then glanced out the window. The midday eclipse had passed, and the long summer days meant she still had an hour or two of daylight.

She sighed, grabbed the book, and climbed to the roof.

 

From her perch next to the tall golden spire at the heart of Dirk’s palace, Roxy turned the tome over in her hands, admiring it. It was a new edition of the book, though that didn’t necessarily mean the content of the book was new. She’d check the opening notes and see if the scribes had made any comments about the author or original publication in a moment.

For now, the physical appearance and weight of the book were impressive enough. It was bound in the modern style of Skaia, something of a rarity on Earth because of the need of Space enchantments to accomplish the binding. The cover was a lightweight wood wrapped in oiled cloth of a rich, deep purple, accented in metallic silver. The book must have weighed at least several pounds, about a foot in length, seven or eight inches in width, and about four deep.

Having inspected the outside of the volume carefully, Roxy finally opened the book to its very first page.

The first page was blank, but a sheet of paper was folded and stuffed tightly up into the binding so that it wouldn’t come out of the book without someone intentionally tugging on it. On it was a note scrawled in a hand that clearly did not belong to a scribe, slanted and a bit cramped.

Roxy’s eyebrows raised in surprise as she read:

>   
>  _Dear Roxy Lalonde, Rogue of Void,_
> 
> _I am sorry that I cannot introduce myself properly yet. Under ordinary circumstances, I would not prefer this more cloak and dagger approach to communicating with you. As unbecoming as it is for my station, though, it seems quite fitting for yours._
> 
> _I believe that if all goes to plan we will be meeting very soon, and at that point I will apologize in person for this melodrama. Until then, I hope that you find this book illuminating and useful. I annotated it myself for you, with the hope that my insights might be interesting to you._
> 
> _I suspect that there are many presents you would find more diverting, but as with the model of the Palace of Light I sent for the Seat of Spirit, I assure you: I give gifts with great intention._
> 
> _With great anticipation as I look toward our meeting,_
> 
> _SL_  
> 

The initials at the bottom of the letter were inscribed in greatly embellished script.

Well. Roxy read the letter again, nonplussed.

Whoever SL was, their letter certainly made them sound… stuffy. But also intriguing. “If all goes to plan?” What plan? Whose plan? Roxy’s plan? And how about the “I give gifts with great intention” line! Roxy had just yesterday been disappointed that Dirk’s gift could be so well chosen while her own seemed woefully offbeat to her interests.

How had SL known she would be thinking that? The mere fact SL had chosen to include such a line in their letter surely meant they were quite a wise and canny judge of character.

A puzzle, to be sure. Roxy inspected the rest of the paper, front and back, before putting it down to return her attention to the book. She flipped the pages one at a time, looking at the title page with lovely, flowing script. The book was entitled _The Aspect Castes and Their Classes_. The author was someone named Andrea Hussein, and it seemed to have first been written some thirty years ago.

The scribes had not made any further notes about the author or the text, so Roxy kept going.

The book was divided into thirteen sections, one for each Aspect including the Signless. The Elevated castes came first: Light, then Life. Next were the Dimensional castes, in order: Time, Space. To round out the Noble Aspects were the Untethered castes: Breath and Hope. Roxy was surprised to see Heart categorized as Untethered as well, since it was a Low Aspect and not Noble, but she supposed it made sense, if you were going to lump it in somewhere with the other Aspects. Besides this very moment, she had only ever seen Heart as a standalone caste, grouped with no other Aspects. It certainly didn't belong among the common Flesh or unholy Corrupted castes, which followed, in order: Mind and Blood; Rage, Void, and Doom.

Having done a quick glance through, Roxy flipped to the Void section. After a brief introduction about the Aspect’s defining traits and cultural significance, there was a section for each of the twelve Classes and how their characteristics interacted with Void, as well as the common powers that manifested with the particular combination, and its cultural significance. The Classes were listed in their order from highest to lowest: the four upper Classes of Seer, Prince, Heir, and Knight; then the mid classes, Sylph, Bard, Witch, and Mage; and finally the low classes, Page, Thief, Rogue, and Maid.

Her curiosity about the book’s format sated, she flipped back to the front page of the Void section and started to read.

A page in, she noticed a pattern to the strange ink blots dotted throughout the words.

She hadn’t brought anything to write with, nor paper to write on, so she had to try to make sense of it mentally instead of being able to jot down what she was noticing. She barely noticed the hour as it passed, until at last, she cracked the code.

It took her a few times through the first several pages to remember the whole message, but once she had it all figured out, she felt herself grinning with anticipation.

_Roxy, I knew you would start here! Read closely about Rogues of Breath. Ask Jake for my second present tomorrow. He will understand. Enjoy your reading. SL_

Rogue of Breath? A mystery wrapped in an enigma. She glanced with a frown up at the sky, whose dwindling twilight was getting too low to read by. Skaia floated there, impenetrable and ominously dark as it blocked her view of the slowly appearing stars. No use staying out where she couldn't see to read. With sure feet and graceful ease, she maneuvered her way back down from the spire and to her window.

At her desk, she lit her candle (she wondered idly if a Maid of Light could just produce light without a candle, then brightened at the thought that now she could just look up that information in her new book), set out several fresh pieces of paper, an inkwell, and a pen, and got to business.

 

For the second day in a row, Roxy was left to attend to Dirk’s boring administrative work while he filled his day with Jake. Oh, she _knew_ that they were doing important state business, but as she sat on Dirk’s hard throne, her chin resting on her hand, the chain of office around her neck seeming to weigh her down like an anchor, her imagination ran a little wild. In her mind’s eye, she kept replaying those little hopeful glances Dirk kept sneaking at Jake as the Page watched the Prince show off his wood. 

Wooden models.*

(Okay, resentful brooding or not, mental self high-five for the Hope pun and another one for the wood joke. Nice. Work. Roxy.)

By the time the day drew to a close, her head aching and her eyelids heavy, she had played out a thousand scenarios, each one less generous to Dirk and Jake. The boys (that’s what she was calling them now, “the boys”) sneaking away to spend time out beneath the sun together, avoiding their work to flirt while Roxy dealt with endless bureaucrats. Jake leading Dirk on, only to leave him lonely in a few days when he left for Skaia again. Dirk putting on airs about being Noble, scheming for ways to get away from Earth and leaving Roxy behind to try to pick up his slack. Dirk and Jake laughing at her Corrupted self sitting on the Seat of Spirit, pretending to be almost-Noble like Dirk.

Between not sleeping much the night before, spending the day doing boring tasks she disliked, and these anxieties about Dirk and Jake, Roxy was not exactly in a good mood when dinner time rolled around.

She trudged to her quarters, ready to collapse into her bed, when a servant caught up to her in the hallway and delivered a summons sealed with a crowned heart. She looked at the card, which had a hastily scrawled “Come to dinner, DS” across its back, before crumpling it in her hand with annoyed, simmering displeasure.

She _did_ stop by her room to shed her bra, though, because enough was enough. If she had to sit through dinner, she was doing so with the girls free and cool.

Dinner was thankfully just the three of them, and Jake did a fine job carrying the conversation with minimal input from Dirk and Roxy. Dirk kept frowning at Roxy from time to time, no doubt picking up on the moody vibes she was serving up on a massive fucking platter. Or maybe to watch _her_ pick up that second… third glass of wine.

One thing did brighten her evening, though, as she remembered the cryptic note from SL.

“Jakey!” she said in a lull in the conversation, voice singsong in a way that made Dirk frown even more. She leaned forward, her chin propped on her hand as she looked across the table at the ambassador.

“Yes, Rogue Lalonde?”

“Oh, so formal, Page English!” Jake reddened a little at her tone, which was decidedly sultry. “Aw, don’t worry, I’m not the one you’ve gotta watch out for, if you know what I mean.” She winked repeatedly, or maybe blinked because she wasn’t 100% sure if she was executing her mad wonks properly. Jake just looked confused, and a quick glance at Dirk told her he was both mortified and angry. “So, Jakey,” she continued, hoping the change in topic would defuse her homobro, “I hear you’ve got another little something for me from our mysterious Skaian benefactor!”

Jake cheered considerably. “You found the note in the book, then!” he exclaimed. “When I was told that I had to wait for you to discover the note, I was rather worried! What if you hadn't found it before I had to leave? Dirk, could you send for a servant to fetch something from my quarters?”

As he requested, so did his prince do. Fuck, Roxy was kinda more drunk than she had thought.

A few moments later, during which time Roxy tried to pry information about ‘SL’ out of Jake (who actually managed to impress her with his ability to keep everything on lockdown, he had always struck her as a bit of a loose-lipped pushover), a servant arrived with a box. It was clearly a garment box, long and thin, with a lovely lavender ribbon tied around it. Inside, Roxy rifled through some delicate, dyed paper that itself must have been quite expensive, to find….

“Breath Aspect clothes?” Dirk asked, confounded.

Roxy thought back to SL’s notes in the book, trying to think why they would send her a lovely Rogue tunic and leggings in sky blue and white, complete with a Breath gust on the breast. She would have to check out her translation of the code again, see if she missed something. Of course, the relevance might be made clear in the part of the book whose code she hadn’t managed to decipher before falling asleep last night.

“Well, boys, it’s been fun,” she said, standing abruptly. She drained the last of her wine, stumbled a touch as she pushed away from the table, and rushed eagerly to her quarters.

Trying to translate or read her notes from last night proved a fruitless endeavor, though. Sobriety had at least one thing going for it: it was easier to fuckin’ read when your vision wasn’t doubled.

So instead she fell into bed and, despite her best intentions to make a plan for how to tell Dirk tomorrow about her intentions to leave for Skaia, she drifted into a shallow and uneasy sleep quickly.

 

To say the day didn't go how she wanted was an understatement. It started with a hangover and message from Dirk asking her to travel to the Doom Quarter to explain what was going on with the Gardens renovation. She tried to send Candy but the woman would not budge since Dirk himself had requested Roxy go. At the Gardens, she juggled angry investors who wanted their fancy shops and angry Doom residents who wanted their Gardens updated. She didn't blame them. She'd have to see about some funds for their community council for redoing the dreary, run-down park. Yeesh. It had been a long time since she had been in one of the Corrupted quarters. She didn't miss it.

When she finally got back to the Seat, the midday eclipse was at its height, yet she was still sweaty and gross from being in the heat. Her hangover had not been cured by the romp through the Land of Doom and Angry People, surprise. Who knew that dealing with poverty and opportunistic vultures in the heat of summer wasn't a hangover cure? Everyone. Everyone fucking knew that.

Before she could even think the word “bath,” Courtney cornered her with an urgent situation about the upcoming ectobaby batch. One of the Mind provinces in the nearby countryside had failed to make its adoption report, and the ectobiologists were almost ready to start discerning Aspects, so it wouldn't be long now before the batch needed to be distributed to families. Roxy turned around and clambered into a waiting carriage to ride two and a half hours out to the province and yell at not one, not two, but _three_ Princes of Mind about the lack of report. God fuck damn, one Prince at a time was enough. Roxy was pretty sure being a Prince automatically made you an asshole, best friend not excepted.

Speaking of her best friend.

When she was finally back at the Seat (a-fucking-gain), it was past dinner time. She asked for food, wine, and a bath, and retreated to her quarters. After the bath and supper (only two glasses of wine, thank you very much), she felt human enough to finally track down the Prince of Heart himself to broach the subject that had been weighing on her heavily for days.

She turned the corner into his workshop to see Dirk showing Jake some of the paintings he and Roxy had made. They were ironic pieces of shit, atrocious depictions of their least favorite people. Honestly, Dirk was actually a great painter, and Roxy wasn't too bad if she could be bothered to focus on making a good painting. But they had started this series of well-executed, horrible portraits as children as a way to blow off steam together, misfits with terrible guardians who needed a creative outlet for their pains and hurts. When Dirk had inherited the Seat and had named Roxy his Shadow, they had kept up the practice in secret. Candice had several portraits in the collection.

But never once, not fucking once, had they let anyone else in on the joke.

And he was laughing, his guard so low that Roxy didn't even know if it was up. This was _her_ Dirk, the Dirk only she got to see, unguarded and soft and so, so precious.

Jake was laughing, too, his hand casually braced on Dirk’s arm as he listened to Dirk explain something about the painting they were currently looking at.

Roxy didn't really think, just picked up the closest thing she could—a chunk of wood waiting to be sanded—and hurled it as hard as she could at Dirk. It struck his shoulder, causing both him and Jake to yelp in surprise and turn to stare at her.

“Jesus, Rox,” Dirk said, perplexed and more than a little miffed at the rude greeting. He rubbed at his sore shoulder. “Why the fuck did you do that?”

She leveled a finger at Jake and snapped, “Out!”

Jake and Dirk exchanged confused looks, then Dirk said slowly, “Roxy… you can't order Jake around. You know that he out ranks us both.”

“That's—that's quite alright, chum,” Jake said, hands lifted in protest. “I don't want to cause trouble. I'll—I'll see you at breakfast, then?”

Dirk nodded and Jake left, awkwardly giving the still fuming Roxy a wide berth.

As soon as he was out of the room, Dirk crossed his arms and frowned at her. “Have you been drinking again?”

“That is not even _kinda_ relevant,” she snapped.

“It really fucking is.”

“How could you?” she shouted. “How could you bring _him_ in here like that?”

“What are you talking about?” Dirk asked, sounding honestly perplexed.

It was worse, so much worse that he didn't even fucking know, hadn't thought twice apparently of just bringing a goddamn Noble into their escape, their safety valve, showed him things that were _not his, not meant for him or for anyone like him_. And Dirk just… didn't know why she was mad.

“While you've apparently been ruining the only good part of my life, I've been doing all of _your_ work!” she snarled, instead of saying what she meant.

“Ruining what? Roxy, I am so lost you might as well dump me blindfolded in the middle of a forest I've never been to before. At night. I'm so lost a police officer is going to take me by the hand and scold my guardian if I'm ever found. Can you just… tell me why you've apparently lost your mind?”

“Do you even know where I've been all day?” she demanded, prodding a finger into his chest accusatorily. “Dealing with your problems!”

“Last I checked, they were _our_ problems because you're my fucking Shadow and it's your job, too!”

“Yeah and while I've been running in circles with those assholes trying to convert the Doom Gardens into shops—”

“Which is a problem _you_ made by changing my plans last minute—”

“They were terrible plans! You want to take away the one open park in the Doom Quarter? I guess you've forgotten what it was like to have nothing, Mr. Hotshot, but I remember.”

“Don't you dare accuse me of forgetting where we came from—”

“Accuse you? Ha! Like I even need to. You're in here fraternizing with fucking Jake English, Page of Hope! As if it wasn't clear enough that you have forgotten some rather important things, like that he's a goddamn Noble—”

“Roxy, I—”

She kept going, not even acknowledging his interruption. “—and as if it wasn't the fucking Nobles who spent years hunting us and kids like us down, and as if it wasn't the goddamn piece of shit _Nobles_ who _killed Callie_ —”

“How _dare_ you—”

“Oh, how dare _me_ , right, sure. That's rich, coming from you, walking around here like you're one of _them_.”

“It's not like we have a lot of options, here, Roxy! Just because you can fuck around at your job doesn't mean we all can!”

“No, you'd just rather fuck a Noble than fuck around with your best goddamn friend. What the fuck, Dirk! How could you bring _him_ in here?”

Dirk rubbed at his forehead, exhausted and frustrated. “I don't know what you want me to say, Rox.”

“I want you to say this is all some sick joke and you haven't been treating Jake fucking English like he's your friend!”

“He is my friend,” Dirk said quietly.

Roxy recoiled as though struck. “No, Dirk. He is a Noble, no matter how much he looks and acts like a puppy. When push comes to shove, he will eviscerate you for nothing more than because he feels like it. You know who is your friend? Me. And who would be, if she hadn't been fucking hunted and killed like an animal? Callie.”

“Stop saying her name like I've forgotten her!”

Roxy felt something cruel and angry bubbling up in her. She sneered at him. “Haven't you? Look at yourself, Dirk. Wearing those clothes and fucking around with a Hope Aspect like you'll ever be more than just another puppet of the Empress.”

Dirk just sat down on his bench, shoulders hunched. “Get out, Roxy.”

She opened her mouth to keep going, but he looked up and met her eyes, and the haggard, enraged look on his face stopped her. “Get. Out.”

She got out. She wasn't planning on coming back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it matters to you—Dirk is my favorite and I am not writing him as a straight-up asshole. This is just the exposition, so hang in there. His character gains depth soon!
> 
> Thanks for reading! Your kudos and comments keep me going, so thank you!


	3. Skaia

There was a reason Rogues of Void were so wildly unpopular, right alongside Thieves of Void. When Roxy took void from things, she could wrap herself in it like a blanket. Unlike a Thief, Roxy couldn’t turn that Void around into some kind of directed force, but she _could_ bring others into her void bubble (as she called it) which made anyone under her protection—including herself—almost invisible.

_Almost_ because most Seers could see through the void bubble, especially Seers of Void and Blood. She had never had reason to interact with Noble Seers, but she guessed at least Light would see her with no problem. But running into the Seer of Light herself? More likely that she would be struck by lightning eighteen times than meet the High Priestess herself—rumor said she seldom left the Palace of Light to walk among the non-holy castes, and only very important people were granted audiences.

Roxy had no problem with the Seer of Light. It might be almost as improbable to meet the Empress, but her odds were better because she was gunning for the woman.

Speaking of guns, she was currently toting her favorite rifle through the Seat’s palace, along with a pack slung across her back with SL’s book, Rogue of Breath clothes, and a few of her outfits that were plain, undecorated with Rogue or Void embellishments. Hopefully people on Skaia also walked around in regular clothes sometimes, or her Rogue of Breath garb from SL would get smelly, fast. She wearing a plain, brown-and-blue tunic/pants combination today, and her burden had never felt lighter without the chain of office and Dirk’s sigil hanging from her neck.

No one saw her navigating the hallways with the gun and bag. It was the day after she and Dirk had fought, late in the evening. She hadn’t been able to make moves sooner because Dirk had been looking for her, and kept stopping by her room. She had been watching, but didn’t call out or make her presence known. Most of the time, Jake had been in tow, anyway.

Now that she had had a chance to sneak into her rooms and pack, she was making her way out of the palace. She went by Dirk’s workroom, paused to look inside.

Dirk was pacing and rambling; Jake was seated on the bench looking miserable.

“—just leave, she’s never done this before. And I didn’t even have a chance to talk to her about why you came this time.”

“Would that change things?” Jake asked quietly.

“I think it would change everything,” Dirk said, stopping pacing and collapsing onto the bench next to Jake, hanging his head into his hands with his elbows propped on his knees. “But I guess we won’t know, now.”

Curious and feeling a bit guilty, Roxy almost revealed herself to ask about what Dirk meant. Just then, though, Jake laid a hand on Dirk’s knee hesitantly, and the tender gesture curdled the words in her throat. “I’m sorry I have to leave tomorrow, mate. I wish I could be here for you until Roxy comes back.”

“What if she doesn’t?” Dirk asked miserably.

Roxy ran to get away from the regret and guilt filling her lungs like water. “Sorry, Dirk,” she whispered as she slipped out of a service door and into the night.

 

Dirk did not come to the shuttle station the next day to see Jake off. Roxy knew this because she was lying in wait, watching people come and go until Jake finally appeared with his entourage of Signless and Seat of Spirit envoys. Carrie was in the front, looking very proud to be wearing a temporary chain of office. Roxy was not very surprised that she felt almost no pang of jealousy at this. She had taken Dirk’s offer of the Shadow position because it was her only way to avoid a life in the slums, and because Dirk had promised they would use their power to mitigate the Empress’s power on Earth. Unlike her bestie, though, administration and government work did not suit her; she was relieved to be done with it, even if she would always be grateful to Dirk for bringing her along once he became Seat.

Jake and Carol exchanged pleasantries as the Signless loaded the shuttle. Roxy was careful not to draw too much void around herself as she moved stealthily among the Signless. Too much stolen void and you actually made people notice the lack of lack… Dirk had been the first to discover this with Roxy, and had used the trick for years to find her when she had tried to hide from him, until she had finally forced him to confess how he always knew where she was despite her best efforts.

“If you know what to look for, it’s not too hard,” he had said. “Things start to look… more colorful and vibrant. Bigger, almost, or closer together, and it’s focused around where you are.”

Since then she had practiced stealing _just_ the right amount of void from around her, to make herself hard to see but without warping reality enough to be noticeable in the negative.

She watched carefully for signs of discovery among the people around her, and was confident that she had sneaked aboard with no one seeing. She followed the servants down into a storage area, found a nice, empty corner out of the way behind the ladder, and settled in with her things. The shuttle ride was short, she knew, so as long as she was quiet, she would be on Skaia within a few hours.

_She would be on Skaia._

Roxy’s heart fluttered rapidly as she listened to Jake board the shuttle overhead, his heavy footsteps noticeably different from the light-footed scurrying of the Signless. She heard him say something to one of the servants, then his footsteps retreated. She felt the cabin doors close and watched as some Signless came down into the hull to secure the last of the trunks and boxes, then they returned upstairs and shut the hatch, presumably settling in among the seats on the main level.

Moments later, the whole shuttle began to shake, and Roxy experienced firsthand why the Signless had been so careful to strap everything in so tightly. She bit back a surprised yelp as she fell hard into the wall to her left as the whole shuttle seemed to lean back sharply. She was just starting to regain her bearings when it settled back to even keel, and she thumped hard into the ground where she had been sitting before. Her rifle skittered across the floor.

“What was that?” she heard someone ask from just outside the hatch.

A muffled reply.

“No, I’m sure I heard something.” The hatch opened and light flooded down from above.

Roxy looked anxiously at her rifle on the other side of the hull, out of reach and too distant to easily wrap up in her void bubble. If someone discovered it, they might look hard enough to find her. She could run for it, but risked her footsteps being heard. Boots were now visible on the top rungs of the ladder.

“I swear,” a new voice said from above, sullen and cutting, “you never believe me when I say I latched everything down tight.”

The boots stopped. “Aw, c’mon, that isn’t fair and you know it. I just heard something! Maybe something slid out from the bindings.”

“Wasn’t nothin’ to slide out,” protested the second. Roxy bit her lip, breathed in silently, and tiptoed to her rifle.

“I’m just going to check, or do you want to be the one to explain to His Excellency why one of his gifts from the Seat is broken?”

A huff, then the feet descended, followed by the legs, torso, and finally head of the Signless Roxy had first overheard. She shrank against the wall and wrapped herself, her rifle, and her bag, tightly in her void bubble.

The man looked around, inspecting the lashings on the trunks and boxes, then harrumphed and returned to the ladder. She listened to the second voice give him a self-satisfied ‘I told you so’ before the hatch closed again.

Roxy let out a relieved sigh and slumped down the wall until she was sitting, still hugging her bag and rifle close. Holy shit that had been way too close. She supposed she should have anticipated the takeoff being rough, and was now thinking ahead to how she would avoid the same disaster at landing as she took out her Rogue of Breath garb and changed into it, careful not to make any noise.

The material of the tunic and leggings was very fine, and the embroidery down the arms and at the cuffs in white and yellow was obviously stitched by a very skilled seamstress. Perhaps most notable of the many impressive elements to the outfit was how well it fit Roxy. How had SL known her measurements so well? Even the boots fit like she had gone to a cobbler herself.

Just as she finished stowing her plain clothes back into her bag, the shuttle began to shake ominously. She quickly gathered everything and braced herself against the ladder. This time when the shuttle tilted back to nearly vertical, she was prepared. She clung to the ladder and her things desperately, managed not to fall or drop anything. The shuttle leveled out back to horizontal quite abruptly, and she bit back her startled grunt as best she could. Nobody heard; she could just barely hear disgruntled muttering above her about the rough docking.

Now was the tricky part. How did she get up the ladder without being seen? She had planned to follow Jake back to the Empress’s palace, since she assumed he would go straight there to report back to Jane and Betty about his trip. It was her best chance to sneak into the palace, since Jake’s presence would open normally closed doors. Not to mention she would probably be hopelessly lost if she didn't have someone to guide her.

But if she went up the ladder now, she risked opening the hatch to an audience of Signless preparing to descend to retrieve the Page's cargo. 

Her predicament was solved when the first Signless came down the ladder and opened a side hatch out to a loading dock. Roxy almost groaned with how obvious the door should have been; of _course_ the cargo hold had a side door. On Earth, they hadn't been able to use it because the shuttle station wasn't built for passenger shuttles like this one, and of course no one was going to ask the Page of Hope to climb _up_ to the seating area, so instead the servants had been tasked with taking all of the cargo _down_ through the floor hatch. Roxy guessed Jake had never even thought about how inconvenient that was for the Signless. The invisible burden of being a low caste.

She scurried off the shuttle as soon as she had the opportunity. She disembarked onto a loading deck that was below the main floor of the dock. The main door to the passenger compartment of the shuttle was directly above her, and was connected to the main floor of the station by a long bridge, so she could see Jake exiting the shuttle above her.

Stairs. She had to get to the main level before Jake disappeared. She looked around desperately for anything that would get her up there. Nothing was immediately evident, but she did see some servants disappearing around a dark corner to her right. Good enough! She made her way as quickly as possible without losing her void bubble or bumping into anyone.

Her instincts were good. She ascended the stairs and gasped at her first view of the shuttle station.

The ceiling must have been over twenty feet high, an expansive dome of soaring metal beams connected by what looked like white canvas. The material was translucent, letting diluted sunlight filter into the hangar and illuminate the interior. Shuttles to all different destinations were docked around the floor she was on, which was shaped like a big ring with radiating docks to both the outside and inside. Immediately adjacent to Jake's passenger shuttle were the much larger cargo shuttles that went to and from Earth daily. Where the other shuttles went wasn't immediately clear to Roxy, but she could tell by their size and the people boarding or exiting that they were primarily passenger shuttles designed to move big groups of people around Skaia.

And there were so many people.

Roxy lived in a highly populated city; she was used to crowds. But nobody spent time in a shuttle station on Earth, because the shuttles only went to and from Skaia and the Earthstuck did not. Only the people who worked loading and unloading cargo from the shuttles had much business at the stations.

Perhaps that was why this station looked more like an opulent mall than a warehouse. There were indoor gardens, trees flowering above benches where people waited for shuttles to arrive or depart. There were stalls selling food that smelled oddly foreign to Roxy's nose, spicy and sweet and meaty. A small group of low ranking priests walked by and she flattened herself back against the wall despite still being invisible, staring in wide eyes at the orange and yellow robes of the Light Aspects. Holy. Shit. She had met some priests before because sometimes they came to Earth on charity or ritualistic missions, such as installing Dirk as the new Seat of Spirit. But to just see a group of priests strolling by was… actually terrifying. Light Aspects were the ultimate authorities in the Empire, and to be discovered by one now would surely mean her immediate execution.

She watched a man stop to buy some kind of snack she didn't recognize from the closest stall, and realized with a sinking feeling that the money she had brought from Earth was not the currency of Skaia. And somehow she doubted it was very normal for a random Breath Aspect to show up at a bank with a bunch of Earth money wanting to exchange it.

Laughter drew her attention to an excited group of school children dressed in red or black uniforms. Time and Space Aspects. They were maybe ten or eleven years old, walking behind a pair of adults Roxy presumed were their teachers. A class trip, it seemed. The children were clearly marked by their castes, but also by signs of their Classes. These were low Class children, all Maids, Pages, Rogues, and Thieves.

As the parade of school children marched past, Roxy watched in surprised horror as people in the same sky blue clothes as her _flew_ above her. Sure, she had heard that some Classes of Breath could fly, but _holy shit._ It was one thing to hear about Heirs, Witches, Mages, and Knights of Breath soaring around Skaia, and another to see them. Not all of them wore blue, confirming her hopeful guess that people on Skaia didn’t always display their caste in their clothing choice.

In fact, many people around her were in plain clothing, at least as many as those wearing Aspect-specific clothes. Earth fashion was radically different from Skaian, however; outside of the standard Class outfits, which were the same on Earth as on Skaia, the clothing here was embellished and fancy in ways that few people preferred on Earth. Many women wore summer dresses of cotton and silk with hoop skirts, or more modern A-line dresses that flowed loosely around their bodies. Other women wore leggings and tunics, but these were embellished with ruffles at the hips, poofy sleeves, and ribbons. Men wore breeches tucked into light summer boots, shirts or tunics with loose, ruffled cravates, hats with feathers and plumes. And their _hair_! Roxy had never seen such ridiculous styles, and she grew up with Dirk. Men and women alike wore styles that must have taken a great deal of time to perfect.

With a sudden stab of panic, Roxy remembered why she had rushed upstairs. It hadn’t been to gawk at Nobles, but to find one specific Hope Aspect. Where was Jake?

She looked around for him desperately, but he was gone. There were so many possible directions for him to have taken—had he gotten on another shuttle, or left via a foot exit? Had a carriage come to pick him up?

Holy… shit.

Now it hit her, _really_ hit her. She was alone in a foreign city, with no money, where her very presence was a capital offense, and she didn’t know the customs that would make her blend in. Following Jake had been the plan, and she had blown it by gaping like a child at a carnival.

Well, at least she could probably drop the void bubble without fear of being recognized now. Besides Jake and the Signless servants who had seen her on Earth, nobody here would recognize her. Enough Nobles were wearing their Aspect colors that Roxy would blend in, even if her hairdo was far too plain to be fashionable.

The rifle would be a problem, though. For now, she could maintain a small void bubble around it, but that was not an easy thing to do long-term, nor was it a very foolproof solution. After all, she still had to carry it, and someone was bound to notice the awkwardness of her trying to stealthily carry an invisible rifle eventually.

She stepped back into the stairwell and let the void bubble fade away, then concentrated on making the rifle disappear. After it was safely invisible, she lengthened the strap on its case by feel and put it over her shoulder in the same direction as the bag that hung across her back, so that the strap would not indent her clothing in strange ways. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was the best she could do.

She took a deep breath and stepped back into the open. People glanced at her now, but carried on with their business like normal. She swallowed hard and started to walk, trying her best to look confident and like she belonged there. She was acutely aware that her bag full of clothes and her book did not fit in very well among the other bags she saw, but if anyone asked she could say she had bought it at an Earth goods stand and thought it was novel.

She walked to the guardrail of the inner circle between two dock bridges, and looked down. Her breath caught in her throat. Was that… Earth? All the way down there? It seemed like the inner circle docks were for shuttles going to and from the planet below, rising and falling vertically, while a glance behind her showed the outer circle shuttles moving to and from docks horizontally, going between here and other parts of the floating metropolis.

She backed away from the edge and looked for the closest exit to Skaia. Happily, there were signs overhead pointing her in the right direction, and she followed them to the exit. Outside, she was faced with even more staggering sights than she had found in the shuttle station.

Mostly, she just felt very, very small. Things moved fast around her, buildings towered over her, the park that stretched out behind her seemed not to stop in either direction, circling all of the Skaian island. The boulevard that stretched in front of her toward the city center was wider than any road she had seen on Earth, shared by pedestrians and carriages alike. Trees were being tended by people of every Noble class but Light and Life, twice as tall and with double the blossoms of those on Earth.

Steeling herself, Roxy looked down the boulevard toward what she knew was the center of Skaia, because the edge was to her back and the place was basically a big floating disk. If the edge was behind her, the center was in front of her.

_You got this, Roxy,_ she told herself. _Let’s go kill the bitch._ Remembering what she came to do helped. She squared her shoulders, resettled her bag and gun, and set off.

 

A few hours later, Roxy found herself in what was clearly an outer ring of housing for Breath Aspects. It had its own little downtown, the street lined with food carts and stalls. She wished desperately to stop and eat something, but had no way to buy anything. At this rate, it would take at least several more hours to reach the center where she hoped the Empress lived. From Earth, Skaia didn’t seem this big, but the longer she was here, the bigger the island seemed. It must have been thirty miles in diameter, judging as best she could by comparing how far she had already walked and how far she could see she still had to go.

She saw a crowd gathering nearby and went to see what was happening. Buskers were performing, a pair of men wearing Breath blue and juggling what must have been eight balls between them. A third performer laid beneath the moving bridge of balls and would occasionally puff a blast of air up into it, changing the pattern and rhythm of the throws. Then the other two changed from catching and throwing the balls to using their Breath powers to juggle them back and forth, little gusts of wind catching and reversing the momentum of each ball. The third was helping, catching a few balls at a time in the middle so that each juggler was handling two or three balls at a time, making the whole thing manageable.

It was very impressive. Roxy joined the cheers of the crowd afterward, then watched in awe as the jugglers took a bow and the audience showered them in coins.

She couldn’t juggle or do Breath stunts, but she knew one Void power that would impress, and which she could easily pass of as sleight of hand magic tricks.

She wandered the downtown until she found a likely spot to perform, then caught the eye of a group of cheerful looking teenagers.

“Magic trick?” she asked.

One of the teens stopped and grinned at her. “An Earth accent? Really? Such an old cliche.”

Roxy felt her heart stutter, but tried to keep an even smile. She shrugged. “It’s all part of the show.”

The teen looked to her friends, who all shrugged and nodded. Roxy grinned. Okay. She had been impressing her friends with her showmanship since she had been a kid. Ham it up, Rox.

She held her hands out, empty. She flourished her hands, and a little green box now sat in each palm. The teens looked suitably impressed. Roxy kept the boxes small, not nearly as big as she could make them, so they could plausibly be hidden somewhere on her body.

She flourished her hands again, rotating them at the wrist, and now she held four boxes. She tossed them up into the air, and it was eight boxes that rained down.

Several of the teens clapped appreciatively as each little box bounced onto the ground. Roxy took a little bow, collected her perfectly generic objects that she never had trouble summoning from the void, then sat down and set them in a neat row in front of her, four across. Another row behind it. As the teens watched in surprise, she added another row, so that it was now twelve boxes arranged in a four by three rectangle. She added another row, making it a four by four square. She didn’t stop, kept plucking generic objects from the void, make a three by three square on top of the bottom one, a two by two on top of that, and topped it with one last square, concentrating hard to make it red instead of green to imitate a cherry.

She grinned up at the teens as they laughed at the red cube, then they fished around in their bags and tossed her some coins. She gave them each a cube as a souvenir.

Their laughter had attracted the attention of a few other people, so Roxy set about repeating the trick. She vanished the cubes, redistributing void back into them one by one as people watched, and disappearing the boxes got her some gasps and exclamations. Into and out of the void went her cubes, and her pile of coins grew.

As she took a bow and collected her fifth round of coins, she saw some of her audience members glancing worriedly at an approaching man wearing black. His clothes looked like Aspect clothes, except black was the color of Space and the man’s sigil was certainly not the Space spiral. Instead, his chest bore a gray-and-black sign Roxy didn’t recognize. He made her very uncomfortable. 

She thanked the last of her spectators as the crowd dispersed, then collected up her coins and belongings, doing her best to blend in with the others as she started to casually walk away. She ducked around a corner, then peeked back at the man in black.

He was standing where she had been a moment ago, sniffing. He took deep breaths, frowning, then turned his head a bit as though catching a scent. He followed the trail to a little green box that Roxy had apparently forgotten to send back into the void. He picked it up, held it to his nose, and inhaled deeply. Then his hand crushed the box, and he turned on his heel and started to stalk off in the opposite direction, towards city center, his gait purposeful.

Whatever had just happened, Roxy didn’t like it at all. She looked down at the coins she had earned, and hoped it was enough to get her food today.

It turned out that it was enough, though discovering this meant _also_ discovering that buying food in a foreign currency is really hard when you’re trying to pretend like you’re a local. Not only did she have no idea what words to say to order the food, nor what she was ordering, she also had no idea what the woman selling the stuff meant when she said, “Six gull fifty.”

Roxy looked at her coins. She had small silver coins in various denominations—looked like five, ten, twenty, and fifty—and larger gold coins, also with several weights—one, two, and five.

She nervously selected out a five and one of the golden ones, and a fifty piece of the silver, and offered them to the woman. The woman snatched them, clearly impatient with how long it had taken Roxy to offer up the coins, then handed her a bowl of steaming food.

Okay. Golden coins were ‘gulls,’ and about six of them would buy a cheap meal. She counted up what she had left. Just shy of twenty-two gulls. Well. It would have to last. Maybe she could busk some more tomorrow, though whatever it was that had attracted that strange man to her generic object made her hesitant to try.

The food was spicy but tasty. Rejuvenated from the rest and meal, she checked on her still-invisible rifle, settled her bag more comfortably across her back, and started in the same direction as the man with the unknown gray-and-black sign: the center of Skaia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks for reading! New characters coming in the next chapter... :D I'm pretty excited about it! Things are picking up.
> 
> Comments? Yay! I love them!


	4. Fortune

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter had so little interaction with other characters and so much description... so have another! With new characters! And people talking to each other!

Roxy did her best to smooth out wrinkles from her tunic and primp her hair, but she guessed that she looked pretty much like she had slept on a bench. Which… she had. After a day spent walking toward the center, Roxy had found a park in which she had spent the night under the stars—and OH GOD could she see all of the stars, the entire night sky stretching above, her view of the Void uninhibited by a floating city.

Now it was early morning—sleeping under the night sky meant rising with the dawn for Roxy, who slept best in the dark. And the long summer days meant dawn came way too soon. Oh well, at least she had slept like a rock—turns out spending the whole day walking across a city makes you tired.

She collected her things and checked on the void bubble surrounding her rifle. It was intact; the gun remained hidden. She could not maintain void bubbles while sleeping, so she had hidden the weapon under her body last night in case someone came across her. Apparently, no one had, because she still had her fifteen gulls, gun, and pack full of clothing and her book. She begrudgingly conceded imaginary points to Skaia—it apparently had less of a problem with thieves and pickpockets than Earth.

Clothes and hair in passable condition, possessions and money accounted for, Roxy set off to find food. Bakeries that opened at the asscrack of dawn to feed people on their way to work were apparently a universal constant, and she almost cried with relief at the familiar sight of a bagel. Thank god for familiar, cheap food.

The day before, she had indeed found the Empress’s palace. Unfortunately, she had been right that most people were not granted easy access. Had she been able to follow Jake, she might have slipped past the guards unnoticed. But it had been late in the afternoon and the open lawn had been emptying of people as guards called last warning before closing the gates. From the little Roxy had seen, there appeared to be an outer wall around the lawn with gates that closed at night, and an inner wall that was carefully guarded by Knights and Witches of various Aspects, and a few people in those odd black uniforms that Roxy had never seen before.

Today she went back to the lawn, intending to wander in casually, but when she got there, she hesitated. Several of the black-uniformed guards were standing at the outer gates, and was that—it _was_! It was the same man who had picked up and crushed her little green cube. She moved a little closer, hoping to hear what he was saying to the others.

“—alert, make sure you memorize the scent off this thing,” he said, and Roxy did her best to look nonchalant as she craned her neck to see what he was waving in front of the others’ faces. Her heart dropped. It was her void cube.

“Why, boss?” asked one of the others, a big hulking fellow.

“Because it’s Void, you idiot,” snapped the first, brandishing the cube in front of the other’s face angrily. “If there’s a Void Aspect on Skaia, we can’t let our guard down for a second.”

The shorter guard turned his nose to the air and sniffed. “I smell it now, Cap,” he said, looking around. 

Roxy started to edge away. _Don’t look panicked, don’t look panicked._ She was totally panicked.

“Course you do, asshole,” she heard the boss say, “I’m waving a cube of it in front of your face!”

Roxy didn’t hear any more, out of earshot. As soon as she was around a corner and out of sight, she started to run. Oh shit. Ohhh fuck. They could _smell_ Void? How could someone _smell_ the essence of nothingness? Fuck fuck fuck.

She ducked into an alleyway and leaned against a wall, thinking fast. If they could smell Void, could they smell _her_? Or just the generic objects? She thought back to her busking trick the day before. The guard had clearly been attracted to where she had been performing by the overwhelming scent of her popping objects back and forth, stealing the void out of them then redistributing it back into them at will. If that was the case, then it was the actual act of manipulating her Aspect that made it… smellable. 

That didn’t rule out that she herself smelled of Void, of course. The short one back at the gates had been sniffing around like he had smelled her. Perhaps… the rifle? It was still shrouded in void bubble.

Well, that was no good. She could let go of the void bubble to avoid being tracked by scent, or she could maintain it to avoid being arrested for carrying a rifle around the streets of the city. She chewed her lip, considering. She could try to stash the rifle somewhere, to be retrieved once she had an idea of how she would get past the guards? But where? She had no idea where to even start finding a safe spot to hide the gun.

“Think, Roxy,” she whispered, biting a nail worriedly. “What do you know about Skaia.”

Okay, she had learned a lot. She knew that the Empress’s palace was _not_ at the dead center of the city, but rather in an adjacent district dedicated entirely to the Life Aspects, which was to say, to Betty and Jane, since they were the only ones. The very center of the city was the Holy District, where the Light Aspect priesthood was based. At the center of the Holy District was the Palace of Light.

“The Palace of Light,” she whispered, brightening. She knew that Jane, at least, visited the High Priestess’s palace weekly. And she happened to have had a chance to study a perfectly scaled model of the palace and its grounds. It wasn’t as sure a plan as following Jake into the Empress’s own palace, since she didn’t know if Betty frequented the Holy District, but it was something. Maybe she could follow Jane back if Betty didn’t show. The guards surely wouldn’t stop to _sniff_ the Inheritor herself.

There was the small problem of food, still. She didn’t know if Jane would go to the temple today or six days from now, so she would have to find somewhere convenient to stake out. If there were none of those black-clad guards around, she wasn’t worried about using her Void powers to hide. Maybe she could steal food from the Palace of Light’s kitchens. But she wouldn’t risk busking again.

For now, she decided to risk carrying the rifle in the void bubble. If she saw any more of those guards, she would ditch the gun somewhere rather than risk being detected. There were other ways to kill a queen.

 

The Holy District was beautiful, with many lesser temples lining the main walk to the High Priestess’s own palace. Technically, Light Aspects were the ultimate authority of the Empire, but the Empress was actually in charge. Occasionally, the priests would decree a holy law, but their role was mostly ceremonial. People of all Noble Aspects flocked to the Holy District to visit the various temples or see the Palace of Light for its splendor. The High Priestess, Roxy learned, made a weekly appearance in the main chapel of the palace, and people lined up for hours to see her and be blessed by her.

Roxy had seen riches aplenty on Earth; Dirk was the highest Earthly authority, so it wasn’t like she was a foreigner to wealth and opulence. But the Palace of Light surpassed everything she could have imagined. Seeing it in miniature could not even come close to the awe-inspiring sight of the towering domes and spires. A reflecting pool lined by flowering trees with bright pink, purple, and white blossoms lay in front, shallow and shimmering as it caught the image of the white and gold palace. Fountains lined the outside of the reflecting pool, bubbling among flowerbeds with immaculately maintained yellow and orange flowers. The pool connected to a shallow, decorative channel of water that circled the entire palace. The main entrance had a beautiful, ornate bridge leading to it.

People bought oranges and plums from vendors, taking them as offerings to temples. Other vendors sold cloths used for various rituals, from marriage, to funerals, to cleansing of illnesses, and more. The sheer linens were dyed in rich yellows, oranges, and purples, and Roxy saw a good deal of people wearing them as veils, on their way to and from temples for the various ceremonies.

She noted with relief that the vast majority of people here dressed in their Class and Aspect garb, probably since the primary reason to visit was for ceremonies; in her Rogue of Breath outfit, she fit in quite well. Her bag was a bit anomalous, but not enough to make her stand out too much.

She made her way toward the Palace of Light, reviewing what she knew about the grounds and entrances. The model had shown side entrances to the palace, and she walked purposefully toward one now. She followed the curve of a hedge around to the side, crossed over the shallow channel surrounding the palace, and stopped as she observed the door. It was not guarded. In fact, she hadn’t seen any of the black-clad guards since entering the Holy District. Perhaps they were the Empress’s own personal guards? Here, she had only seen a few Knights of the various Noble Aspects scattered about as guards or peacekeepers, their own Aspect signs complemented by the yellow sunburst of the Holy District to distinguish them as officials from other Knights visiting for ceremonial or tourist purposes.

Roxy hesitated outside to unguarded door and bit her lip, debating if she should just barge in. It was better to risk it than to stand around being indecisive all day, right? She shrouded herself in void, a sense of relief flooding her as her Aspect enveloped her in its comforting absence. She twisted the door handle.

It was unlocked. She waited for a moment to see if anyone would come to investigate why the door had seemingly opened on its own, but no one did. She slipped inside and shut the door again, then made her way down the empty side corridor. The plush carpet kept her footsteps silent.

She turned the corner and was faced with a decision—left or right? Now that she was inside, she had no idea which way to go to find a spot to wait for Jane to arrive. On instinct, she turned left.

The palace started to feel like a maze. She turned left and right and went straight, then right again, all in the hope of finding a good place to bunker down and await the Inheritor’s visit. Maybe she could find a bathroom or the kitchen, too. She passed many people in the hallways, now, so she guessed she was coming into the main thoroughfares of the building. Mostly she saw servants and priests, a few high-ranking people of various Aspects (all Noble Princes, Knights, and Heirs; she even saw a group of three Breath Seers go by talking to a priestess).

Then she took another corner and the crowd thinned; another, and there was no one around at all. Had she accidentally ended up back on the outskirts of the palace halls?

She rounded another bend and stopped short as she almost crashed into a young woman in Light priesthood robes. Roxy managed to dodge the woman, who came up short nevertheless, eyes wide. A man in red Knight’s garb crashed into her from behind.

“Rose, what the fuck!” he exclaimed, grabbing the woman’s arm to steady her as she reeled from the impact. “Warn a bro before you just go and stop all of a sudden.”

Rose, as the priestess’s name apparently was, stared at Roxy. Roxy stared back.

The Knight of Time apparently had no idea what was happening. “Uh, Skaia to Rose, come in, Rose. This is your captain speaking, please give him any fucking indication whatsoever that you are listening, penis, dick, cock—”

“Shut up, Dave,” the priestess said coolly.

“That counts,” Dave answered her. “So now that you’re listening, I repeat: Rose, what the fuck?”

“Clearly we have a visitor, Dave,” Rose said calmly, gesturing toward Roxy. Dave looked at the spot where Rose had indicated. Roxy stood there, frozen to her spot, barely even breathing. How did Rose know she was there?

“Uh,” Dave said. Roxy noticed his hand was on his sword hilt now, but he looked confused more than alarmed.

“Hello,” Rose said to Roxy. “Are you lost?”

“Rose, who are you talking to?”

“Can you not see her, Dave?” Rose asked, a sudden look of understanding spreading across her delicate features.

“Seeing her would necessitate there being a ‘her’ to see, which there clearly isn’t,” Dave answered.

Rose smiled, now, in a way that made Roxy a little scared. “I see,” replied the priestess, looking like the cat that ate the canary. “Roxy, is it?” she asked.

Roxy looked around frantically, trying to find a way to get away, to escape, abscond, vamoose—

“Not to worry, Roxy Lalonde. I’ve been waiting for you. There is no need to run, but could you drop the shroud of Void so my dear bodyguard here will stop thinking I’ve gone mad?”

Roxy hesitantly let go of her void bubble. Dave’s eyes widened as she seemed to appear out of thin air.

“How did you see me?” Roxy demanded. “And how do you know my name?”

“I think the answer to both of those questions will be quite clear if you take a minute to consider the evidence in front of you,” Rose replied serenely.

Evidence? What evidence? Roxy looked around and saw nothing but the priestess and the Knight. She looked closer at Rose. The woman wore the most ornate robes she had seen yet, the orange and yellow fabric embroidered with white suns and stars. Her neck was draped with golden jewelry, and a golden circlet was nestled into her hair.

A sinking feeling in her chest, Roxy looked back to the yellow sunburst on Rose’s chest. In its center, easy to miss due to being white on yellow, was the All-Seeing Eye of the Seer Class.

“Holy shit,” Roxy said.

Rose was a Seer of Light. Rose was _the_ Seer of Light. The High Priestess herself.

Roxy sank to her knees, actually trembling. “Your Holiness,” she said. “Please don’t have me executed.” She grimaced at herself. _Really, Roxy? The first thing you’re gonna do is plead for your life?_

“How the fuck did you get this deep into the palace without getting caught?” Dave demanded.

“Really, Dave,” sighed Rose. “Have you already forgotten that she was invisible until a minute ago?”

“Okay, _obviously_ I have not forgotten that she was invisible. What I’m asking is _how_ she was invisible.”

“Roxy is a Rogue of Void,” Rose replied, her eyes glued on said Rogue even as she answered her bodyguard. “And an expected guest. Though, I must say, you are rather early. Time has never really been my strong suit. That’s why I keep Dave around.”

Dave rolled his eyes.

“You… you were expecting me?” Roxy asked, dumbfounded.

“Yes, of course. Stand up, please. Let’s go somewhere more private.” She paused, thoughtful. “Somewhere other guards and priests are not likely to come by… thoughts, Dave?”

“Can Town,” Dave said immediately.

Rose turned to stare at him, eyebrow raised. “Can Town?”

“Haven’t I told you about Can Town?” Dave asked.

 

As it turned out, Can Town was a room filled with… surprise, cans. Cans of food that had been stacked and arranged into buildings, parks, roads… a little town comprised of cans and chalk drawings. The room itself was strangely located; Dave led Rose and Roxy through a cupboard under some stairs, then opened a hidden door on the other side of the cupboard into the windowless interior room.

“How did I not know this was here?” Rose demanded. “Is this where you’ve been keeping them?”

Roxy’s shock at meeting the Seer of Light herself was wearing off and now she was panicking. Keeping them? Who was being kept by this insane Knight of Time who built fake towns out of cans in hidden rooms? Was she about to become his next victim? Shit. She should have taken the opportunity earlier to slip back into her void bubble and disappear again, but she had been so surprised at Rose’s insistence that she had been expecting her that Roxy had forgotten to be suspicious of the Nobles.

Shameful, really.

“Yep,” Dave answered. “I thought I’d told you about it,” he continued, sounding a little sheepish. “But you’re always so busy, I guess I forgot. Just assumed you didn’t have time to come visit.”

Rose carefully held her skirts up above the chalk drawings, revealing soft blue slippers as she stepped primly around the first barrier of cans.

“Hello, children,” she said, though Roxy couldn’t see to whom she was speaking. She disappeared, leaving Roxy awkwardly standing at the border of Can Town with the Knight of Time bodyguard.

Dave was watching Roxy suspiciously. “You’re Void?” he asked.

Roxy nodded, tense.

“Never met a Low Aspect before,” Dave said, face blank, eyes hidden by a darkly tinted pair of spectacles, the likes of which Roxy had never seen before. She found herself thinking that Dirk would like them. “What are you doing on Skaia?”

“Gonna kill the Empress,” Roxy said. What difference did it make if she was honest? Dave already had legal justification to kill Roxy. Rose’s word was the final law of the entire _world_. Roxy should have been executed the minute Dave had learned she was not Noble, yet here they were.

Dave snorted, craning to see over the taller can structures, keeping an eye on Rose. “Here to kill Betty,” he said, his tone adding the subtext, _why am I not surprised._ “Why are you here?”

“I just said—”

“No, I mean, why are you _here_ , at the Palace of Light?”

“Oh. Well, the guards at the Empress’s palace were on to me.”

“Yes, they have a genetic mutation that allows them to sense Low Aspects,” Rose’s voice said, and she reemerged from the depths of Can Town, a child on her hip. The kid was maybe eight or nine and wore a sash that said “MAYOR” on it. He clung to Rose, eyes fixed worriedly on Roxy. “The Empress has an entire battalion of them, patrolling Skaia. You’re not the first non-Noble to make their way to Skaia aboard the shuttles from Earth.”

“Really?” Roxy asked, clenching her rifle in one fist nervously. “I’ve never heard of any others.”

“That’s because Jack and his crew have caught them all,” Dave said, one eyebrow cocked as he purposefully directed his gaze to her tight grip on the gun. His own hand rested meaningfully on his sword hilt.

“Jack is one of the guards?” Roxy asked, forcing her fist to relax.

“Their leader, yes,” Rose confirmed, setting the child down on the floor. He leaned back against her legs, one hand grasping her skirt. “I sense that you’ve seen him already.”

Roxy thought back to the guard she had first encountered, the one who had found her void cube. “Yes, I bet I have,” she confirmed.

Rose opened her mouth to continue, but Dave cleared his throat and interrupted. “Rose, we’re about a minute from being late,” he said, a small frown on his lips.

The High Priestess sighed, then gently disentangled the child’s hand from her skirt. “Pardon me, Mr. Mayor,” she said gently, smiling. “I have official business to attend elsewhere. Will you show my guest Roxy around your town?” The boy looked between Rose and Roxy with wide eyes, then nodded.

Rose smiled again and smoothed the boy’s hair, then stepped away from Can Town and turned to face Roxy as Dave waited impatiently by the false door. “Please… be patient. I know you have little reason to trust me, but I promise you, if you wait for me now, I will explain everything as soon as I can. Tonight.”

Roxy bit her lip and nodded slowly.

Rose nodded, too, serious. “I’ll have Dave bring food by while I’m dealing with the Dersites.”

Then they were gone, leaving Roxy with the little boy whose name she didn’t actually know. The Mayor of Can Town. “Guess I’m the court jester,” she said bitterly. Of all the things that could have happened, _this_ was not even on the list of possibilities she had entertained.

Just as Roxy was starting to seriously consider leaving Can Town and the Palace of Light, the Mayor tugged at her tunic. She looked down at him, and he gestured into Can Town.

Well, she could at least get to the bottom of this. Why did the Seer of Light and her bodyguard have a child sequestered away in a hidden room in the palace? Why hadn’t they exposed her and sent her to her execution? She had even told Dave that she wanted to kill Betty, _god_ she was stupid.

The Mayor started pointing things out to her. He didn’t speak, but made sure she noticed things like the blue chalk lake that had little paper boats on it, and the library that consisted of canned columns and a book roof. The schoolhouse also had a book for a roof, but other “buildings” seemed to consist only of cans. Everything was labeled in chalk, some of the writing was neat and precise—Dave’s, no doubt—and other letters were large, messy, and malformed. The Mayor’s.

Or—well, the _children’s._ Rose had greeted more than one child, and now Roxy saw why. There were three other children hidden back here among the cans.

They watched Roxy approach warily, fear clearly stamped across their features. The youngest was no older than five, Roxy guessed, and the Mayor looked like the oldest, though one of the others seemed to be close to his age.

“Hello,” Roxy said gently, smiling. She set her rifle and bag down away from the kids, then came closer slowly.

One of the children gestured rapidly at the Mayor, and Roxy frowned. That had looked like—

The Mayor signed back.

These children were using sign language. Roxy was familiar with the concept but had never seen anyone actually use the visual language before.

Rose had spoken aloud to the Mayor and he had understood, so Roxy knew the boy wasn’t deaf. Perhaps he was mute?

She sat down near the group of children and said, “My name is Roxy.” She looked around, found a piece of chalk, and wrote her name so they could see how it was spelled. The Mayor pointed to the “R” she had written, then made a sign. Roxy imitated it, then followed his lead with the next three letters. She put them all together, clumsily spelling her name in sign language. Now the children were watching with tentative smiles and interest.

“What are your names?”

The Mayor took the chalk, and wrote, “Marcus,” then pointed to himself. Roxy said the name aloud and the boy nodded. Next he wrote, “Perry,” and pointed to the next oldest child. The girl wore a pretty pink and blue dress, and regarded Roxy with a serious, thoughtful look. Roxy greeted Perry, who gave a small, quick wave. Marcus introduced the next two as Blanca and Reggie, and Roxy said hello to the younger two. They seemed more willing to be friendly than Perry, and came to investigate Roxy.

She let them touch her hair and her clothes, telling them about how she had received the pretty outfit from a friend as a present.

“Why do you live here, Marcus?” she asked the boy as he and Perry sat apart from her, watching her interact with the younger kids.

He frowned, then stood up and gestured for her to follow. He led her to a can building that read “Life Palace” and pointed to it. Then he looked around and found a piece of black chalk and drew what Roxy immediately understood to be the black-and-gray sign of the Empress’s guards.

He pointed to the sign, then cupped his right hand into a C shape and held it in front of his face, moving it in two little circles, then pointed to himself, then back at the other children.

Roxy frowned. “The guards? They’re… looking for you?” she guessed. Marcus nodded, smiling a little. “Why?”

He pointed to his throat, opened his mouth and made a wheezing sound.

“Because you’re mute?” she interpreted, and he nodded again. “Why does that matter?”

He gave her a funny look, like he was surprised she had to ask. Then he pointed to the black sigil he had drawn and pantomimed drawing a knife from a sheath and stabbing it into his own chest.

Roxy’s eyebrows rose. “They would kill you just because you’re mute?” she demanded, surprised. Marcus nodded.

Their attention turned to Reggie, who brought a can of corn to Roxy and was gesturing toward the chalk lake. She followed him, then discovered that on the other side of the “lake” was a cornfield. She smiled and added her can of corn to the field, and then for a while all four children showed Roxy around Can Town, inviting her to add or fix things. Blanca started a demolition project, taking out some houses on the far west side of Can Town, much to the frantic signing and distress of the other children. After a while, it was apparently decided that the now vacant lots would be converted into a temple, and the children set about finding the appropriate cans and chalk colors to build this latest installment.

They recruited Roxy to do the writing, and she added flourishes to the script, doing her best to make the words “Temple of Light” beautiful. The children apparently loved this, and began to point to other words in their own or Dave’s hands, wanting her to make these just as fancy.

How long they were at this, she wasn’t sure, but they were eventually interrupted by the hidden door opening. The children scattered, leaving Roxy to stand and brush chalk dust off of herself. She assumed it was Dave returning with food, and hurried to see what he had brought. She was hungry!

But it wasn’t Dave. It was a woman in fancy Witch of Space clothes, who had just started to call out to the children when she caught sight of Roxy standing there in her rumpled, chalky Rogue of Breath clothing.

With a defensive cry, the Witch of Space made a strange gesture with her hands, and she was suddenly leveling a rifle right at Roxy's chest, finger on the trigger. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hurray! Rose and Dave! The Mayor! Can Town! Wow!
> 
> Comments? I REALLY DO LOVE THEM. <3 looking forward to the next chapter, it's gonna be a fun one!


	5. Pitfall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!! Please!!! Check the end notes for trigger warnings. The end of chapter is rough.

Roxy stared at the rifle. There was a distressingly small amount of space between her chest and the end of the gun’s barrel—no more than four feet.

“Well?” the Witch demanded, eyes narrowed, finger on the trigger. “Are you trying to snatch these kids away from me again?”

“I—no! No, that’s not—”

“How did you find this place?”

Roxy mentally scrambled for options. Answering the Witch’s questions and talking her down? Possible, but hard since she, (a) had no idea who the woman was, (b) had no idea what the woman was doing here, and (c) would undoubtedly accidentally out herself at some point as a Low Aspect and get shot anyway. Risky. She couldn’t go for her gun or any other weapons. She _could_ make herself invisible, but would the Witch just shoot out of reflex if Roxy vanished all of the sudden? Also risky.

“Answer me!” demanded the woman.

“Okay! Yeesh! It’s not like it’s everyday a girl gets a rifle up in her business, you know? Give me a break!”

The Witch scowled. “Why are you here?”

Fuck fuck fuck did this trigger happy moron like Dave and Rose or not? Gambling time!

“I bumped into Rose in the hallway—”

The Witch’s eyes widened. “Did you just call her by her name?” she demanded.

“Uh—”

“Jade!” a new voice interjected.

Roxy and the Witch (Jade, apparently) looked in surprise to the false wall entrance to Can Town. Dave stood there, arms full of food.

“Dave, thank goodness,” Jade replied, returning her attention to Roxy and shaking the gun menacingly in her direction. “There’s an intruder!”

“Yeah, I fucking know,” Dave said, dropping the food and moving so fast he was a blur in Roxy’s vision. He was right next to Jade now, and was very carefully easing the gun’s aim downward. Roxy’s lungs filled with air in a way that made her realize she had scarcely been breathing once Dave had successfully gotten the gun away from Jade. “I brought her here, okay?”

“She’s a friend?” Jade asked, eyes still watching Roxy suspiciously as the Rogue leaned over, hands braced on her knees as she caught her breath.

“Well,” Dave said uncertainly, glancing at Roxy with a frown. “She’s… she’s Rose’s guest, at least.”

Yeah, well, Roxy wasn’t about to call him a friend either. Fuckin’ Nobles, all high and mighty.

Roxy missed how it happened, but Jade made the gun disappear again. Witch of Space. She’d have to consult SL’s book later and see if she could discern what that would mean in terms of powers.

Jade cleared her throat, looking a bit remorseful. “Well, if you’re here at Her Holiness’s bidding, then I certainly can’t argue!” She smiled at Roxy now, extending her hand in greeting. “Peace?”

Roxy didn’t particularly _want_ to shake her hand, but she also didn’t want to rock this boat any further and get a gun shoved in her face again. She took Jade’s hand and shook. “Peace,” she agreed.

Jade shook heartily, grinning now. “Great! Sorry about the rifle. My name’s Jade, by the way. Jade Harley, Witch of Space.”

“Roxy Lalonde, Rogue of—Rogue of Breath,” she lied, uncertain. Earlier she had been cavalier with telling Dave about her plan to assassinate the Empress, but he had already known that she was on stolen time, a dead woman walking. No need for yet another Noble to have legally justifiable reason to kill her.

“Rogue of Breath, eh? Not everyday you see one of them this deep in the Palace of Light,” Jade said amicably enough.

Before Jade or Roxy could say more, though, Dave asked her to go find the kids and bring them for a meal, effectively distracting the Witch away from asking Roxy all the questions she undoubtedly had. Jade complied happily, calling the names of the children as she disappeared into the depths of Can Town.

“Thanks,” Roxy muttered as she moved to help him retrieve the food he had dropped upon arriving to see Roxy at gunpoint. Happily, most of it was wrapped up in cloths and on a big tray, so nothing had been ruined.

Dave’s face remained impassive, but Roxy noticed the way his fingers flexed. It was a tense, unhappy movement, and had she not grown up watching Dirk’s every miniscule gesture as clues to his state of mind, she probably would have missed it. But to her trained eye, Dave was a surprisingly easy read, and his body language said clearly that he was displeased, on guard.

Still, he nodded in recognition of her thanks, handing her a pitcher of water to carry. He gestured in the direction of Can Town and then followed her with the food tray, directing her to the area Roxy had first encountered the children besides Marcus.

Jade was sitting there with the children, using a bowl of water and a cake of soap that she had apparently conjured up (seriously, Roxy needed to read up on Witches of Space) to wash their hands.

“After lunch, we’ll have baths,” she told Perry as she oversaw the girl’s hand washing. Perry nodded but Reggie and Blanca shrank away, making faces. Jade raised her eyebrows at them. “How long has it been since you’ve had a bath, hm? Too long, busters!”

Together with Dave, Roxy helped set out the food, and before long the whole crew was eating. Dave and Jade took the least, but since arriving on Skaia Roxy had been eating with a mind toward preserving her very small sum of money, so she was famished.

Halfway through the meal everyone tensed up as the door opened and closed to the hidden room, then relaxed again as Rose’s voice filtered over the can buildings to their dining area. “Hello?”

“Back here, Rose!” Dave yelled, and a moment later, the High Priestess appeared, holding her gratuitous skirts aloft once more.

Roxy watched as Rose took in the sight of them sitting on the floor eating together, and their eyes met for a long moment before Rose turned her attention to Jade with a smile. “Hello, Jade. I did not realize you would be coming by today.”

“Hi, Rose!”

“Wait,” Roxy interjected, turning with affront to the Witch of Space. “You give me all this shit for callin’ her Rose, but _you_ get to just like that?”

Jade frowned at her. “Where did you say you’re from? Your accent isn’t Skaian.”

Rose stepped in. “Roxy, I’ve been thinking all morning. Why did Dirk send you ahead?”

Jade’s frown deepened, but she did not interrupt. Roxy stared with wide eyes at the priestess, unsure how to answer. “Send me… ahead?”

“What, are you about to tell us he’s lurking around here, too?” Dave asked, looking quite displeased at the prospect. “‘Keep Rose safe, Dave,’ they say. ‘It’ll be easy, Dave’ they say. ‘She just stays in her palace all day, Dave.’ Yeah no one fucking told me that she’d be harboring criminals and children, and there’d be fucking Low Aspects popping out of thin air and dragging their murderous Princes behind them—”

“Dave,” Rose interrupted, voice full of an exaggerated patience that managed to sound quite impatient, “you’re rambling again.”

“Low Aspects?” Jade asked, looking with greater suspicion at Roxy.

Rose and Roxy sighed in unison, then exchanged a startled look at how similar the reactions were. Rose’s expression turned to a frown as she looked around at the group, all of whom were watching them closely. “Roxy and I have much to discuss,” she said. “We’ll be doing so privately.”

Roxy said, “We will?” at the same time Dave said, “You what?”

“Come along, Roxy. You may bring your things if you’d like. Dave, stay here with Jade and the children, won’t you?”

“Where are you going?” Dave asked, alarmed, on his feet even before Roxy, who was feeling a special kind of confusion. What the hell was going on? “Why can’t you talk to her here, with me and Jade around?”

“Because, Dave, if you had not noticed, every time I try, I am interrupted by a certain Knight or Witch who cannot keep their questions and commentaries to themselves. Now, I will be in my personal quarters with our guest, and I believe your time would be better spent with these children than sulking outside my door.”

 

Once they were under the stairs, Roxy wrapped herself and her possessions in her void bubble. Rose paused. “Can you make me invisible, too?” she asked.

Roxy nodded, nervous. She wasn’t sure what was happening, really, and Rose unnerved her a bit. Okay, a lot. Because Rose was the fucking Seer of Light and Roxy had spent her whole life imagining the Seer of Light less as a human woman and more as… a goddess, really. People on Earth talked about her like she was all-knowing, too close to the deities to have characteristics like curiosity, impatience, or exasperation.

“Would you, then? That way, we can take the most direct route back to my rooms without anyone stopping us.”

So Roxy took a moment to expand out the void bubble and encompass the Seer of Light as well. Rose held an arm aloft, looking at it with a shrewd smile. “How fascinating,” she murmured, clearly seeing more than Roxy. Dropping her arm, Rose nodded to Roxy, and led her out into the hallway.

They walked stealthily through the hallway, Rose leading. Roxy was entertained to see the Seer crouching a bit, one hand balled up into her skirt nervously. Huh. It was… disorienting, to see this fabled woman sneaking around like a kid trying to avoid her parents’ eyes after bedtime.

Roxy _did_ have to grab Rose a few times to get her to stop on time to avoid brushing against someone. This was something Roxy had forgotten was a skill she had honed for years, and it was almost comical to see Rose so focused on avoiding something ahead of her that she completely forgot to be mindful of other directions.

They eventually made it to a less crowded hallway, and when the coast was clear, Rose opened an ornately carved wooden door just enough for Roxy and herself to slip inside. When the door was shut, Roxy dropped the void bubble and Rose let out an exhilarated laugh.

“That was so much fun!” she exclaimed, almost childlike. It struck Roxy as a wildly out of character moment for Rose, but the incongruence made something crystallize in Roxy’s thoughts. An epiphany of sorts.

Rose was… just a woman. A young woman, at that.

Roxy had been struggling with this all afternoon, but putting her finger on it, _really noticing_ it, made her stop in her tracks. Of course it was perfectly logical, but… given the hype and worshipful whispers about the Seer of Light, to think of her as just another person was a startling revelation.

And then a touch of anger stirred in her chest. Rose laughed about sneaking through the hallways, but the worst that would have happened to her if they had been caught was _maybe_ a scolding. But really, who the fuck even scolded the Seer of Light when she stepped out of line?

For Roxy, being stealthy had, on more than one occasion, been her only means of survival. 

Unpleasant memories stirred ( _hiding, cramped spaces, shh don’t let them hear_ ) but she clamped that shit down tight, redirecting the negative feelings toward Rose for treating lightly what for Roxy was a matter of life or death.

Fuckin’ Nobles.

Rose led her through the antechamber of her quarters and into a sitting room. The room had many bookshelves with books of every kind, scrolls, maps, and more. Hanging on the wall was a map of Skaia, and next to it, a map of….

“What is this?” Roxy asked, staring wide-eyed at the map.

“The Skaian Isles, of course,” Rose said, as though this information was obvious. Roxy saw the familiar shape of Skaia at the center of the map, but there were two additional floating islands, one figured to the North, labeled Prospit, and one to the South, labeled Derse.

“There are… three? Floating cities, I mean?”

Rose cocked her head to the side, curious. “Yes. This is not something you knew?”

Roxy shook her head, marveling. How is it she didn’t know this? It seemed like fundamental knowledge of the planet, and it wasn’t like she had had the _worst_ education available on Earth. She had learned a lot about Earth geography; she knew where all the major cities were, the mountain ranges, rivers, and lakes of the habitable land, and the oceans that cut humanity off from whatever lay beyond. But she had never actually left the capital city from which Dirk reigned.

Not to mention, she was one of the very, very few Earthstuck who had interacted directly with Nobles, and a high-ranking government official. Did Dirk know about these other islands? Did that older bureaucrat woman, Carla or whatever her name was? Did _anyone_ on Earth?

Rose sighed heavily. “The Empress has been influencing the education of the Low Aspects to a more extreme degree than I was aware of, it seems,” she mused, tapping a lacquered nail against her lips. Her gaze was unfocused on the map—she was looking at it, but Roxy didn’t think she was seeing it. “Unfortunately, while I See many things from the Outer Rings, I seldom get specifics. Such as,” she said pointedly, turning her lavender eyes to Roxy, “the timeline of your arrival. I had surmised you would arrive some time from now, with Prince Strider’s official entourage.”

“With what?”

The Seer of Light narrowed her eyes. “I am beginning to think your arrival occurred under circumstances far different than what I Saw. Tell me.”

Roxy bristled. “Look, Rose—er, your Holiness—you’ve been kind to me, and for that I thank you, but I am not here to play whatever games you have in motion. If you’re not going to have me killed, then let me go to do what I came to do.”

“It is strange to me that you have not yet determined that ‘what you came to do’ and ‘whatever games I have in motion’ are the same.” Rose lit a match and held it to a strange contraption that stood on a metal table next to an armchair, like a wide lantern flame fueled by oil with a bar hanging over it. The purpose of this became clear a moment later as she hung a beautiful kettle from the bar and set out two delicate tea cups. “Sit, please,” she invited Roxy, taking a seat herself while waiting for the water to boil.

Unsure what else to do, Roxy sat. “I still don’t understand—”

“That much is very clear,” Rose interjected drily. “Let me make a guess. You somehow managed to leave the capital without talking to Dirk about the news that Jake brought.”

“Uh,” Roxy said, squirming a little under Rose’s intense gaze. Seers, man. Roxy had never met a Seer who couldn’t pin a person to the wall with their eyes.

“And I suppose you also did not ask Jake? No, of course not. So you are here and neither of them know it?”

“Um,” Roxy said.

The kettle whistled and Rose removed it, setting it on a ceramic hot plate to wait for the water to cool to the proper temperature so as not to scald the tea leaves. She flipped a delicate glass timer and the sand began to filter from the top down into the bottom of the pinched vial.

“I see. I am, however, still perplexed by one particular detail. Since you came to Skaia without knowing what Dirk and Jake know, why did you come to the Palace of Light and seek me out?”

Roxy blinked a few times. “I… I wasn’t planning to,” she admitted. “It was the only place I could think to go to get away from those sniffer guys.”

“The Midnight Crew,” Rose supplied, mouth twisting in displeasure.

“Yeah, them. And this was the only place where I had an idea of what I’d be encountering.”

“Ah, the model.”

Roxy opened her mouth to continue, then stopped and closed it, nonplussed. “The model?”

“Yes, the model of the palace that I sent to Dirk,” Rose confirmed.

“You’re… you’re SL?”

The sand finished draining to the bottom of the timer. Rose smiled a bit as she poured the hot water into the tea cups, one hand holding back her wide sleeve as the other tipped the spout precisely. “This is also something you did not realize? I am beginning to wonder how you’ve managed this far with so little information..”

Roxy ignored the barb. “SL. Seer of Light?” she mused. Rose nodded. “But… why didn’t you use your initials?”

“Then it simply would have been ‘R’ and that seems far more cryptic than SL. I am, after all, the only Seer of Light in existence, and there are many people with names that start with R.”

“What’s your last name?”

Rose stared. “I… Surely… Okay. I am properly rebuked. The education system on Earth is truly horrible, and I should have been paying more attention.” She paused, then took a breath and began again. “People born into the Light caste are never given last names. The Knights and Witches selected to be part of my guard are similarly given only first names. Dave and I, for example, are simply ‘Dave’ and ‘Rose.’”

“What? Why wouldn’t you take the name of your parents?”

Rose shook her head. “Light Aspects are never adopted into families, Roxy, nor are our guards.”

“So… who raised you? Where did you grow up?”

Rose gestured around her. “Once it was known I was a Seer, which was of course when I was a baby, I was brought here. Dave, too—he was the only Knight of Time in our ectobatch, and the Mages on duty considered it very fortuitous that he was deemed fit for duty as my guard.”

And then Roxy had a bit of a revelation. She looked around the room of books and maps, perfectly kept and spotlessly clean. And she envisioned a little Rose in here, kept apart from the world, perhaps with only Dave for company, or maybe not even. Rose, with tutors from the Light priesthood, who probably had no idea how to treat their little High Priestess as she grew up (was she a child or a deity among them? did she need discipline or free rein?). Rose, making her own tea and reading books and probably having terrifying visions since she had been a baby. No wonder Dave seemed overprotective.

Rose may have been raised with all of the comfort and security in the world, but Roxy suddenly pitied her. As she had not so long ago observed (albeit somewhat facetiously) about Dirk… heavy the crown.

“Oh,” was all she said. She accepted the cup of tea that Rose handed her, took a sip, and then said, “Thank you for the gifts.” She thought over the gifts as she and Rose sipped their tea in silence for a moment, considering what new information she could deduce now that she knew it had been Rose who had sent them. She had sent Dirk a model of her palace, and Roxy the book and clothing. Clearly, Rose had wanted Roxy to be able to move freely about Skaia in her Rogue of Breath clothing, and the book (had Roxy read more of it) would have enabled her to do so without giving herself away too easily. And the model—well, it had already been more than useful to Roxy as a map of the palace grounds, leading Roxy right to Rose.

“So,” Rose said after a moment, putting her cup down on its saucer. “You came to Skaia without knowing that Dirk would be coming soon. How? Why? What happened?”

Roxy relented and told Rose how she had gotten in a fight with Dirk about Jake, and left on Jake’s shuttle. Rose pointed out how lucky she had been to have the opportunity to arrive on one of the rare passenger shuttles, since the cargo shuttles that went daily to and from Skaia were all checked by Midnight Crew members for signs of Void trickery. After processing this, Roxy went on to recount her first day and night on Skaia, and how she had ended up at Rose’s palace.

“Can you make me a perfectly generic object?” Rose asked, leaning forward with anticipation.

Concentrating, Roxy popped a lavender cube out of the void. “It’s not _perfectly_ generic,” she said, handing over the cube, “since those are green for some reason. But I thought you might like it in purple.”

Rose studied the cube for a moment, turning it over and over, gazing at it deeply as though she could See something if she looked hard enough. “So fascinating,” she murmured, eyes gleaming. “Thank you for this gift.”

“So, what’s with the hidden kids?” Roxy asked, her story finished.

Rose set her new lavender cube down next to the tea kettle. “Jade brought them to me just a few weeks ago. It’s been a few years now since we’ve been trying to hide them from the Empress, but only recently that I’ve needed to shelter them here personally.”

“Why? Marcus said… because they’re mute?”

Nodding, Rose finished her tea and set the cup down. “Yes. As you know, a certain number of children are born Signless, and these children are brought up to be the servants of the Noble castes, living among them on Skaia, Prospit, and Derse.” Roxy nodded along—although Prospit and Derse were new to her, the Signless were not. “Some of the Signless children, at age five or so, are selected out to be made into Midnight Crew members. They must pass certain aptitude tests, and from there we aren’t sure exactly what the Empress’s people do with them. At the end of the process, they are able to sniff out Low Aspects. Some of them, however, do not make it through… or at least not without significant impairment.”

“That’s how they became mute?”

Rose nodded again, confirming Roxy’s guess. “Others lose other faculties, such as sight or hearing. Still others are less lucky and become paralyzed, are driven insane, or die.”

Roxy was shocked. “How many are disabled or die in the process?”

“About half,” Rose replied sadly.

“That’s horrible!”

“It’s even worse than you know. The Empress has the children who are injured in the process killed. When I spoke to Betty about it, she told me it was a good way to keep the Signless population in check.”

Roxy gaped. “How… how _could_ she?”

“I have told her to stop the practice,” Rose said grimly. “And ostensibly, she has, turning the disabled children over to orphanages run by Signless. Yet, she continues to select out Signless children for the tests and conversion, regardless, and I do not trust that she is releasing all of those who fail to make it through the conversation unharmed. In addition, some orphanages have reported that after taking these children into their care, they are usually found dead within just a few short months. In other words, Betty continues the practice despite my direction not to—both the conversion and the extermination of those who fail.”

“That’s… what an evil bitch,” Roxy muttered, unable to think of what else to say.

Rose raised an eyebrow. “Indeed. Though, I believe this is not the first experience you have with Betty’s inclination to kill children she finds threatening.”

_Hiding, kept secret in basements and under floorboards, holding on to Dirk and Callie to keep them from crying as drones moved overhead, running in the night from safehouse to safehouse, passed from one set of hands to another, no family but each other, just Dirk and Callie, just… just Dirk…._

Roxy was jarred back to the present at the sound of her porcelain teacup shattering as it hit the floor, missing the cushioning rug by an inch. She was on her feet in an instant, disoriented, where was Dirk, was he safe, where was _she_ —

A voice cut through her panic, “—Roxy, it’s okay, I’m sorry, please, you’re safe here—”

She looked at its source and for a moment her eyes did not parse what they say as a person, just splotches of color, orange and yellow and brown and blue and oh, oh, that was hair, jewelry, an arm, a hand… Rose. Rose.

“Fuck!” Roxy yelped, staggering back from Rose’s reaching hand. “Don’t touch me!”

Rose snatched her hand away as if burned while Roxy leaned on the armchair, hand clenching into its soft upholstery as she breathed heavily, trying to shake the memories that clung to her and left a resinous coating on her brain and lungs, sticking and binding and suffocating. It was like being stuck in those under-the-floor compartments again, not even breathing for fear that filling her lungs with the stale, thin air she shared with Dirk and Callie would be the trigger that alerted the drones to their presence—

No no no don’t think like that, don’t remember, ignore it ignore it ignore it—

She needed something to ground her here, she knew she wasn’t under those floorboards, but _fuck_ , that didn’t stop her from being there anyway—

She snatched up a jagged edge of the broken teacup and sliced it into her forearm, the pain of it shooting up her arm, giving her a physical sensation to latch onto, a release for pressure in her chest from the scream that _could not escape_.

And then hands were on hers, wrenching the shard of porcelain away from her, ringed fingers becoming slick with blood as Rose covered the new wound on Roxy’s arm with her hands. The priestess was yelling something, fear stamped on her features as Roxy slid to the ground, shivering. Rose sank to her knees next to her, pulling her into her arms, shouting for help over her shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Triggers: self-harm, cutting.
> 
> Oof. It got a little angsty there. Sorry? As often happens, things went in a different direction than I had planned for the end of the chapter. 
> 
> Ha, remember when I said 5-8 chapters? /sigh.


	6. Anamnesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anamnesis means the recollection of the past; reminiscence. [Its secondary definitions are also relevant and meaningful to the chapter.](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/anamnesis?s=t)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!! See end notes for trigger warnings! Thanks  <3

Roxy is four years old the first time she realizes not everyone lives like this.

She is being shoved into a closet roughly, one of her little hands tightly clamped around Dirk’s, and the other around Callie’s.

“Keep them quiet, Roxy!” the woman hisses.

Roxy has always been the quietest, the bravest. Dirk and Callie don’t like the dark, but it reminds Roxy of the wide night sky. She hates being stuffed in closets and hidden away under floors, but it’s the tightness of it, not the darkness, that she hates. The space thing isn’t as bad as the dark thing, she thinks, because she has Dirk and Callie pressed up next to her and if she pretends really hard she can imagine they’re just laying together in bed, snuggled up in a little ectobatch-sibling pile.

The closet isn’t as safe as some of their other hiding spots, but it’s the quickest one, so they hunker in the back together, and Roxy pulls each of her friends under one arm, letting them hide their faces against her shoulders.

She stares straight ahead into the darkness, at the little line of light that is the crack between the closet door and the wall.

She can hear voices on the other side, muffled but clearly raised, and maybe the sound of someone getting hit or shoved. Then that buzzing sound that is made by the drones.

Her heart hammers and she pulls Dirk and Callie closer. The drone’s buzzing gets louder and there is a moment when the line of light in front of her disappears as it passes in front of the closet door.

After a while the buzzing stops and she hears someone yelling, screaming for help, and then nothing.

Nobody comes to get them from the closet until the next morning, and they spend the night huddled together in the dark, and it's the worst night of their lives. In the morning, when the closet door is banged open and they are discovered, all three children are sure they will be killed. It turns out to be some of the other adults in the group trying to keep them alive, though, and they are rushed from the house, told not to look in the kitchen but Dirk steals a glance and tells Roxy later that he saw blood on the floor.

It’s daylight outside and they’re never let out in the daylight. Roxy immediately loves daytime almost as much as nighttime; the feel of the sun on her face is almost a religious experience for her, since it happens so rarely. She sees another child dressed in Heart colors being swung by the hands of two adults in plain clothing but who are wearing Heart pins, and she gapes.

“Who is that?” she asks their custodian, a person she recognizes vaguely as one of the ones who moves them around from time to time.

“Who?” the man asks, looking around worriedly.

“That kid!” Roxy says, pointing. The man knocks her hand out of the air roughly.

“Just some kid,” he says, rushing them into a carriage.

“But he was just outside with other Heart Aspects,” Roxy counters.

“Yeah, that’s how it is for normal kids,” the man says.

Roxy, Dirk, and Callie exchange shocked looks.

“Why doesn’t he have to hide?” Dirk demands.

“Because he’s got a family, kid,” the man says. When Dirk opens his mouth again, the man backhands him. Dirk is knocked flat into Roxy’s lap, and she wraps her arms around him protectively as Callie hunkers close. “Be quiet, all of you.”

 

Roxy is six when they’re taken to see a Mage of Mind for the third time.

The Mage looks them over, taking longer on Callie than on Dirk and Roxy, but in the end, there is still no answer, and their current custodian wilts.

“Why don’t we have Classes?” Roxy asks as they leave the Mage’s home. It’s dark out, well past sundown, and Skaia is blotting out the stars like usual.

“No one knows for sure, Roxy,” the woman, a Bard of Blood named Gayle, says. “Some children just take a long time to develop their Class, that’s all.”

“Are we bad?” Dirk asks. Callie’s hand tightens around Roxy’s.

“What? No, child, of course not,” Gayle says, but her attention is mostly on their surroundings.

“Then why do we have to hide all the time?” Dirk presses.

Gayle shakes her head and ushers them down an alley. “Because some people are afraid of people born without Classes.”

“Why?” Roxy asks.

But before they can get an answer, Gayle draws them up short, pressing them back against the brick wall of a building. Roxy peers around her legs and sees that a house ahead of them is on fire.

Gayle curses and Roxy is suddenly sure that this is their fault somehow. Gayle turns them around and walks them quickly away from the burning house, and takes them back toward the Mage of Mind’s house. The Mage is not happy to see them again.

“Please,” Gayle begs, “just until they’re gone and we can safely get to another safehouse.”

The Mage lets them in. Callie sings them a quiet song as they hide in the crawl space, and it’s the only thing they hear all night except for when Dirk cries a little bit.

 

They’re seven when Dirk’s Class solidifies. Everyone is shocked to learn he is a Prince of Heart. Of course, they’d known he was Heart from the beginning, but… Prince of Heart outranked the current Seat of Spirit. Dirk schools his face into an expressionless mask as the adults whisper excitedly among themselves.

“Will they separate us now?” Roxy asks.

Dirk frowns. He doesn’t know. Callie says, “They still have to find somewhere for Dirk to live.”

 

Roxy, Dirk, and Callie are on their way to a new safehouse after Dirk’s Class was discovered when the drones come out of nowhere. One of the two adults in their group is immediately killed.

The children run for cover. Roxy stumbles but Callie is there to pull her up and the three of them make it to a narrow gap between two buildings where they squeeze in. It’s barely wide enough for them, but they fit.

Dirk enters last, and when Roxy looks back to make sure he’s safely inside, she blinks in confusion as he tells her to stay still and rushes back out into the alley. She watches as he grabs the fallen adult’s weapon, a sword, and seems to split into two, three, _four_ people, copies of himself splintering away from his body, and the four Dirks with their swords attack the nearest drone. One of the Dirks is clawed in half and Roxy screams, but the drone is taken down and the remaining three Dirk splinters merge into one.

Dirk passes out, but the remaining adult has dealt with the other drone and scoops him up, then collects Roxy and Callie and they stagger to a carriage taxi parked two streets over and bang on its doors. When the driver answers, the adult knocks him out with a gauntleted fist and steals the carriage and horses, driving them at a frenzied speed away from the scene.

In the carriage, Roxy and Callie cry over Dirk’s still form. Eventually he stirs and they are relieved, but he’s quieter after that night, seems to have lost a piece of himself.

 

“We’ve found a home for you, Dirk,” the woman says, smiling like this is good news.

Dirk, as always, just stares, face blank, but Roxy sees his hands clench and unclench briefly. “What about Roxy and Callie?” he asks.

“They’ll have to wait until they have a Class, too,” she replies. “Then they’ll have families, as well.”

They’ve been living in the Rage Quarter for several months now, the most permanent place they’ve been in years, while the adults in the network try to figure out a family for Dirk. Technically Dirk is no longer in danger from the drones; they only care about people without Classes and Dirk no longer qualifies as such.

“Test them again,” Dirk says.

“We will, but—”

“I won’t go until they can come with me!”

“Dirk, even if Roxy and Callie have developed their Classes since we last tested them, they can’t go to the same home as you.”

“Why not?” he asks after a long pause. Roxy and Callie are clutching each other’s hands tightly, but the only sign Dirk shows of his fear was the way one hand sneaked behind his back to worry at his shirt’s hem.

“Because they aren’t Heart Aspects. Callie will go to live on Skaia once she—”

“No!” Callie yells, shrinking back. “Don’t make me go to Skaia!”

“Callie, sweetie, you’re a Space Aspect.”

“But Skaia is where the Empress is, she’ll kill me!”

“Not once you have a Class, dear,” the woman contradicts, her tone losing its patient overtures. “Dirk, we’re leaving in the morning—”

“No.”

The woman snaps her head in his direction. “You don’t have a choice in the matter, young man.”

“Test them again,” he says, and he is cold as ice.

The woman opens her mouth, eyebrows furrowed in anger, but before she can say anything Dirk splits himself into pieces, and there are suddenly many Dirks, too many Dirks, and they all have knives and they turn the blades on themselves, holding them to their own necks.

“Test them again,” the many Dirks say, still calm and cold.

The woman is clearly frightened now, unsure what to do with a roomful of Dirk clones all threatening to kill themselves.

“You can’t stop all of us,” they point out in a decidedly creepy unison. “Test them again.”

The woman fails to talk him down and when one of the Dirk clones stabs the knife into his hand to prove he's serious, she flees. Dirk snaps back together and turns to face Roxy and Callie.

“I won’t let them separate us,” he promises, his hand dripping blood around the knife he still grips tightly.

The next day they’re tested again and the results are not good. Callie has developed a Class but Roxy hasn’t, and the adults are buzzing with nervous energy. They are kept at the Mage of Mind’s house and more adults arrive the next day.

“What’s going on?” Roxy asks Callie in a whisper as they eat the sandwiches someone gives them for lunch.

“I don’t know,” Callie says. “They won’t tell me what my Class is.”

“But you have one, now!” Roxy points out. Dirk is standing with his ear pressed to the door, trying to hear what the adults in the next room are saying. “That means you’re safe from the drones!”

“Only if I find a family who will register me illegally, like Dirk’s family will do for him,” Callie says, biting her lip. “And how will I, when they’ll have to take me to Skaia? Surely no _Noble_ would want me.”

“I don’t think you’re going to Skaia,” Dirk says, and the girls look up in surprise as he’s suddenly standing next to them. “They keep saying something about you being a Muse, but I’ve never heard of that Class.”

“Muse?” Callie repeated thoughtfully. “What does that mean?”

“I’ve heard of the Muse Class,” Roxy volunteers. “Remember that one woman, Gayle? The Bard of Blood? I couldn’t sleep once and I made her tell me why the Nobles wanted to kill kids without Classes. She said that there are two Classes that only develop late in childhood, Muse and Lord,” Roxy recites, proud she remembered all of this. “And the Empress doesn’t like either of them because they’re very rare and powerful, so she has kids like us killed before we can grow up into our full power.”

“Muse is very powerful?” Callie asks, eyes wide.

“And we thought Dirk was special, being a Prince!” Roxy jokes. “Hey! Do you think I’ll be a Lord? Dirk gets Prince, you get Muse! Surely I’ll be something really cool and powerful, too. Lord of Void! Or… Seer of Void?”

“I don’t know, Rox,” Dirk says sadly. “I don’t think it’s a good thing that Callie is a Muse.”

 

It is definitely not a good thing that Callie is a Muse.

Roxy doesn’t know how the Empress finds out, but the drones are everywhere now. The adults who were moving them around all the time try to separate them, to take Dirk to his family and to hide Roxy away from Callie, who has clearly become the primary target of the hunters.

The children, who have taken up watches to spy on the adults so they know what’s happening, overhear the adults planning about splitting them up. Apparently the Empress has sent some of her Nobles; rumors spread of Seers and Mages of Breath and Hope looking for Callie, and Knights, Witches, and Heirs of Noble Aspect hiding among the people of Earth, all trying to find and kill Callie.

They run away.

This does not increase their chances of survival, it turns out.

They make it less than a day before the drones find them. Dirk splinters and fights, Callie does something strange and the air around them warps, ripples with power, but she has no idea how to control her Muse abilities, no idea what a Muse is even supposed to be able to do, and what she _does_ end up doing is drawing the attention of some Noble Mages in the area, who feel her manipulating Space and come running.

Roxy isn’t sure what she’s doing but later she’ll remember this moment as the first time she ever reached out and really touched the Void. She wraps herself in a blanket of it as a group of adults come running toward them, and when one of the Dirks gets in the way, he is cut down with what seems to be nothing but air by a woman in the front. The other Dirks scream and blur back together into a singular being, collapsing onto the ground. Roxy pounces on him, wrapping him in her blanket of void, dragging him away from the scene.

She turns to go back for Callie but even as she watches a Breath Aspect suspends the other girl in the air and a Prince of Hope steps forward, lays a hand on her chest—there’s some kind of glowing white light and when it stops, Callie’s body is limp and her eyes rolled back. The Breath Aspect drops her body to the ground and she falls like a sack of potatoes, her head crashing into the ground with no resistance.

The Nobles are directed to find Dirk and Roxy, but Roxy has them tucked away and covered in void, doubly out of sight, and not even the Mages see through her trick. They eventually leave, taking Callie’s lifeless body with them.

 

Roxy half carries Dirk back to the last place they had been living, and a Mage of Mind immediately notices that Roxy has acquired her Class. The children do not fight as they are placed in homes in the next weeks. Dirk goes to live with an Heir of Heart who is willing to fake some papers for him in exchange for some kind of cover-up of a crime. Roxy is placed with an alcoholic woman, a Maid of Void who takes her in and lies blandly to the authorities, in exchange for a better home nearer to city center and outside of the Void Quarter. Both Dirk’s "Bro" and Roxy’s “Mom” lie and say that Dirk and Roxy were from far away cities, children of distant relatives, and had come to the capital to live with their new guardians after some tragedy or another killed their original families.

They are not quite eight years old.

They are no longer hunted.

They find each other, and Dirk manipulates his Bro into paying for Roxy to join his school so they can be together. The school normally doesn’t allow Corrupted students but Dirk makes everyone nervous and they tend to do what he wants if he insists enough. They all know he’ll be the next Seat of Spirit, so people tend to want to please him. Roxy has to walk pretty far to get to school but she doesn’t mind because she hates her new “Mom” and usually Dirk meets her halfway and they can walk together.

To Roxy’s knowledge, Dirk has never once splintered himself again since the day Callie was killed. In fact, he resists his teachers’ best attempts to make him learn about his Prince of Heart abilities, silently daring them to fail him. They don’t. Roxy asks him why he won’t try it out and he tells her that it’s his fault Callie died and if his Prince of Heart abilities can’t help him protect the people he loves then he doesn’t need them.

He trains with weapons instead.

Roxy is relieved when he discovers a fascination with art, especially woodworking. His Bro won’t let him pursue this much (it’s beneath him; woodworking is for common castes; Heart Aspects don’t become artisans) but he does let Dirk take up painting, so Roxy does, too. When they’re older and Dirk takes up his duties as Seat, he starts woodwork again and nobody can tell him no.

They promise each other in those first cold nights as Seat and Shadow that they will use their positions to be thorns in the side of the Empress. Roxy skims money from the Treasury and funds the underground network of people who work to protect Classless children. Dirk complies with Betty’s every rule, maintains her good favor, and by so doing manages to get her to fund major overhauls to the schools and orphanages in the poorest parts of the city, and they find ways to hide the Classless children in plain sight at these places. Betty ends up funding the livelihoods of the very children she tries to eliminate. It isn't perfect, but it's a far sight better than what Roxy and Dirk grew up with.

 

The first time Jake English comes to Earth, Roxy watches as Dirk blushes and pines for the handsome new Ambassador. Page of Hope, so low in the Noble Aspects and Class hierarchy that he’s practically not even Noble. But he _is_.

Roxy even kind of likes him, she discovers after being forced into some meetings with the cheerful fellow. She certainly thinks he’s good looking and understands why Dirk is smitten.

But. 

Roxy cannot forget the Prince of Hope who stopped Callie’s heart.

Dirk cannot remember. He never even had the memory, having been unconscious at the time. Roxy doesn't say anything.

For the first time in their relationship, something ugly begins to fester between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: threatening suicide, self-harm (as manipulation), character death (child), child abuse (one kid gets hit, once).
> 
> Sometimes I write a lot all at once and can't help but post it because I hate hanging onto things once they're written? So here's another chapter because my lack of self control means I can't pace the delivery of chapters. ((I JUST WANT YOU ALL TO KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE STORY))
> 
> T-T
> 
> Oookay next chapter is back to our regularly scheduled Roxy. Less angst more gunning for the batterwitch.


	7. Arduousness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild, mild warning that they talk a little bit about Roxy using the teacup piece to cut her arm open, but it's a brief moment of unpacking, not anything too heavy. Still, if you're very sensitive to self-harm or suicide talk, be mindful.

For the third day in a row, Roxy woke up in Rose’s large, soft bed. The Seer herself was snoring gently on the far side of the bed, arm tossed up over her head in a position that Roxy thought looked rather uncomfortable.

After Roxy had sliced open her arm with the porcelain, Rose had fetched a Sylph of Light to heal her. The Sylph had then spent a while to just talk to her, giving Roxy the uncomfortable feeling of being on a dissection table. After he was done, he had taken Rose aside and privately expressed concerns, which Rose eventually had generalized back to Roxy as being, more or less, uncertainty over whether or not Roxy was suicidal.

“I’m not suicidal,” Roxy had huffed. “I’m _homicidal._ ”

“Then why did you cut your arm?”

Roxy had bitten her lip, and then tried to explain to Rose what it was like to feel trapped by a memory, which was a thing that happened from time to time for her, and that pain was usually the fastest way for her to get out of it. The porcelain shard had just been a convenient conduit for said pain.

Rose hadn’t looked convinced that this was as simple a thing as Roxy was making it out to be, but had relented. She did insist that Roxy stay with her, as there was nowhere safer from intrusion and thereby discovery than her own rooms. Nobody entered them without her permission, not even servants.

Roxy had agreed to stay on the condition Rose tell her when Jane Crocker came to the temple so that Roxy could observe the Maid of Life. Rose had agreed, and when she left the next day, Roxy had asked, “What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”

With a quirked eyebrow, the High Priestess had gestured toward the sitting room where the bookshelves were. “Read. Learn. Wait.”

Now it was Day Three of her stay at Rose’s, and Roxy was starting to feel like a captive. It itched her in all the wrong ways to be stuck indoors, even if Rose’s rooms were expansive and high-ceilinged and at least they didn’t make her feel claustrophobic. But she hadn’t been out under the sky, night _or_ day, for too long and she missed it.

At least in the evenings Roxy got to spend her time talking to Dave and Rose. She found herself liking the Seer and her Knight more and more, despite the surprisingly desperate desire to despise them based on their Aspects. Okay maybe she was learning some kind of life lesson here but really, pass the wine.

Wine was in fact something she and Rose both enjoyed, and probably the reason Rose was still snoring away this morning instead of being up at the crack of dawn like she had been the previous days. Roxy remembered swapping stories last night with her over their second bottle of wine about how similar Dirk and Dave were in their little frowns and snide comments about how much their respective RoLals drank.

Oh and she had apparently decided to give Rose her surname? Shit, how much had she drunk again? Now that she was thinking about it, she distinctly remembered telling Rose and Dave that it was a shame they didn’t have last names, and she had grown up without one until she was about eight, and nobody should have to live like that. Sure, she didn’t even _like_ the woman who had adopted her, but having a last name had opened all kinds of doors for Roxy. Becoming Roxy Lalonde was one of the most significant events of her life.

After adopting Rose as her sister, apparently, she started telling Dave all about Dirk and how they should be Striderbros. She distinctly recalled repeating the word “Striderbro” multiple times while she and Rose giggled helplessly at Dave’s look of distaste.

Fuck. Maybe she really did need to lay off the booze a little bit. She suddenly felt very hypocritical for having been so mad at Dirk for calling Jake his friend, when it took just a few glasses of wine to make her call the _Seer of Light herself_ her sister.

Roxy glanced at Rose’s sleeping form, and felt a bit of fondness blooming despite the guilt and confusion. Truth was, Rose was pretty cool. And yeah, if Roxy had gotten to have a sister (Callie, Callie was dead because of the Nobles) _(Callie was Noble)_ , she would have wanted her to be as cool as Rose.

FUCK this guilt, man, Roxy didn’t need to be sitting around having an identity crisis because one Noble wasn’t so bad (okay, _three_ counting Dave and Jake, and yeah, maybe Jade was alright, and Callie had been her everything as a kid, so? So? So?). Nope, she was not gonna sit around in bed all day feeling like this.

She got up and made her way to the bathroom. The night before, Rose had requested servants to set up an early bath for her, and the Signless had come and gone while both women slept. Although Rose’s bath was far more ornate than hers had been on Earth, it was the same basic contraption. A tub filled with water over a heating device that kept a low smolder under the tub, whose bottom had an insulated air chamber to keep the seat from burning its bather. Overall, a very convenient setup, and Roxy was able to take a warm bath despite the water having been in the tub for an hour or so by now.

By the time she had soaked and scrubbed to her content, Rose was up. Roxy heard her talking to someone in the next room, so she waited until she heard the door click shut outside before leaving the bathroom, wrapped in one of Rose’s warm, long bathrobes.

Dave was there, standing next to Rose, their attention on a stack of boxes sitting on Rose’s coffee table next to their breakfasts. Roxy padded over, grabbed a croissant hungrily, and asked, “What’s all this?”

“Some clothing I had made for you,” Rose said, holding up a new tunic.

It was black and had the Breath gust of wind embroidered over where Roxy’s heart would be if she wore it. On the back was a red Life flare. Roxy frowned.

“I don’t understand,” she said slowly.

“Jane is coming tomorrow,” Rose said. “She is looking for two new bodyguards, and has asked my guidance for selecting them. After all, she has been the target of several very high profile assassination attempts, and she wants to make sure none of the guards she hires on have any murderous intent.”

Roxy grinned, starting to understand. “And we’re gonna make sure they do!” She held her fist up for a bump, which Rose apparently didn’t know what to do with, so Dave sighed and leaned over to complete the gesture.

“So I’m going to be a Rogue of Breath?”

Rose nodded. “I’ll be introducing you later today to an Heir of Breath, John Egbert. He’ll be joining as Jane’s other guard. He knows a bit about what’s going on and will be helping you maintain your cover. Then, the two of you just need to not lose your jobs and keep Jane safe until Dirk arrives next month—”

“Wait. What?”

By now Roxy knew that Jake had been to Earth this last time to invite Dirk and a small entourage to Skaia. It was unprecedented, but Rose had been subtly influencing Jane for months now toward this goal. Jane had convinced the Empress to allow it, and so Dirk, in his official capacity as the Seat of Spirit, had been given an invitation to come to Skaia to meet Betty and Jane, and to discuss with them some humanitarian initiatives Jane had been working on for the Earthstuck.

Rose, of course, wanted Dirk here for entirely different reasons. It all added up to Betty’s head on a fucking platter, so Roxy wasn’t complaining, but…. “A month?”

“Yes. We need Dirk.”

“Why?” Roxy demanded. “I could shank Betty in her sleep anytime once I get inside the palace!”

Rose shook her head but was busy unboxing another garment and holding it out to Roxy, shaking it at her a little when she didn’t take it right away. Roxy held it up while Rose assessed it to make sure every detail was in order.

Dave took up the explanation. “Betty is a Sylph of Life,” he said, drawing Roxy’s eyes even as she held still for Rose. “Shanking her in her sleep wouldn’t accomplish anything. If we’ve learned anything from her relentless inquiries into the different Aspect abilities by Class, we’ve learned that pushed far enough, a Sylph of Life is basically immortal. We don’t even think she’s aging in any meaningful way.”

“So, what then? She can’t be killed?”

“We believe a Prince of Heart will do the trick,” Rose said quietly, and Roxy went stiff.

“You want Dirk to use his abilities to kill her?” she asked, and her suddenly shift in tone had both Dave and Rose frowning at her now.

“That’s the idea, yeah,” Dave said after a minute.

Roxy shook her head, setting the black tunic down. “It won’t work. Why would him splintering himself even make a difference? We can arrange for her to get stabbed by more than one person without Dirk having to cut himself into pieces.”

Rose’s eyebrows climbed. “Splinter himself? Roxy, I… don’t think that’s what being a Prince of Heart means.”

Roxy had been using her free time to work through more of the book Rose had sent her, but she hadn’t read the Heart chapter yet because she was more focused on learning about Skaian culture, which came from the chapters on Noble Aspects. There wasn’t much detail to the chapter on Life, since there were too few cases to make a full study of them, but she had learned a great deal from the chapters on Breath, Hope, and Light, which she had read in full, and she was partway through both Time and Space now.

“What’s a Prince of Heart supposed to be able to do, then?” she asked, her guard rising as she felt a sudden need to defend Dirk and his secrets.

“Surely… surely you know about Dirk’s abilities,” Rose said slowly, testing the waters.

“I mean… of—of course I do,” Roxy said, backtracking. She could read the book’s section on Princes of Heart later when Rose and Dave were out for the day so that she didn’t give away more than she already had.

Rose frowned, making a little _tch_ noise with her mouth as she seemed to skewer Roxy with her eyes. “I wish I could See around you better, Roxy Lalonde,” she said after a moment. “But it’s like staring at a big gaping hole in the world.”

“That’s such a sweet thing to say, Rose,” Dave interjected, rolling his eyes. “No wonder they named you after such a pleasantly fragrant flower.”

“I didn’t mean—I just—ugh.” She threw her hands up in defeat. “Sorry, Roxy. You’re the first Void Aspect I’ve ever tried to get a direct read from, and it’s just very… different… from the others.” She sighed, apparently realizing this wasn’t going any better the second time around. “Look, the fact of the matter is, Dirk is our best bet at killing Betty, and if you try to stab her before he gets here, we’ll never get the chance. So in the meantime, be patient.”

“What am I supposed to do for a month?” Roxy demanded.

“While I find this line of inquiry utterly fascinating,” Dave interrupted before Rose could answer, "I am gonna go ahead and point out that your boredom is not exactly our most pressing problem right now. Rose, we have to go.” Roxy gave him an annoyed frown.

Rose looked back at Roxy as they made for the door, then smiled. “Read. Learn. Wait,” she said.

 

The first thing Roxy noticed about John Egbert was that he reminded her of Jake English. 

John, Dave, Jade, and Rose were a sight to behold, all together. The whole group of them were having dinner in Rose’s personal dining room, and Roxy found herself just… watching. And missing Dirk. Seeing the way John casually ran with Dave’s nonsense, how Rose could goad the boys into defensive posturing, and how Jade let herself get drawn into all the teasing while gently bolstering and protecting her friends… well, it was enough to make a girl feel lonely, that’s for sure.

Of course they were all kind to her, especially John and Jade. But there was nothing quite like having your best friend around. Poor Dirk. She made a mental note to ask Rose if there was a way to send him a message apologizing and explaining herself. He deserved better than her jealous passive aggression.

“Well,” John said with a stretch as Signless servants cleared away dinner plates and brought in dessert, “as much fun as this is, are we going to get down to business?”

“Business?” Jade asked, apparently out of the loop.

“Soon,” Rose said. “We’re still waiting on one more person.”

Dave, who was in the middle of grabbing some cake and shoving it under a repulsed John’s nose, paused and frowned. “He’s late,” he said.

Jade rolled her eyes, taking the cake from Dave as John shook his head and flailed a bit, and wasting no time before digging in. “Not all of us care so much about being on _time_ , Dave. Give it a rest.”

“All I’m saying is, the man is a state official with one of the most important jobs in the government,” Dave pointed out, reaching for another slice of cake and offering it to Rose first. She accepted it, and he continued the process of handing out cake as he said, “Does barging in late, hair a mess, panting like he’s just run for miles, apologizing like a buffoon—does that really say ‘government dignitary’ to you?”

Jade opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, the door flew open and Jake English himself stumbled into the room, pausing to bend over, hands on knees as he caught his breath. “So sorry, your Holiness, everyone,” he gasped. “I do hope I haven’t caused any trouble with my tardiness.”

Dave looked supremely pleased with himself as he gave Jade a _I told you so_ look.

Roxy set her cake down slowly, her heart in her throat as she unconsciously began to reach out to the void, not quite wrapping herself in it but definitely holding little scraps of it to her. Had this all been an elaborate hoax to make her feel safe and comfortable, only to come to a head right here over dessert, with Jake English recognizing her and reporting her to the Empress’s guards? Had she fallen for Rose’s ruse of friendship, when in fact the Seer of Light had been orchestrating a particularly cruel act in which Roxy unwittingly incriminated herself over and over? Was she now to be handed off to Jake and executed for treason against the Empress?

She collected more little wisps of void like a child clings to a security blanket, her panic rising.

God. Damn. It. Roxy. She _knew_ better than to trust Nobles. How could she ever have believed this wouldn’t be how this ended? She should have escaped Rose’s clutches while she had the chance. Maybe then she still could have gotten a shot at Betty.

“Um, where did Roxy go?” she heard John say.

“Roxy?” Jake asked, surprised. Everyone else was looking around the table and room with some surprise, except Rose, whose keen gaze cut directly through the void bubble that had slowly accumulated around her. “You don’t mean _Roxy Lalonde_ , surely!”

Rose raised an eyebrow at Roxy. “You still don’t trust me?” she asked quietly, and four sets of eyes moved with some confusion between the Seer and the seemingly empty chair she was talking to. “From one Ro-Lal to another, I solemnly promise you that this is not a trick.”

Ro-Lal. Rose had drunkenly accepted the sisterhood that Roxy had drunkenly offered the night before, and the sober reminder of their informal, untested kinship declaration stopped Roxy short. She let the void bubble dissipate and gave Rose an apologetic look even as John, Jade, and Jake gasped at her reappearance.

“What the hell?” Jade demanded.

“Roxy!” Jake exclaimed, rushing around the table and pulling her into a tight hug that lifted her off the ground. “Consarn it, dear girl, you had me and Dirk in quite a tizzy when you disappeared from the Seat!”

Roxy patted his back, starting to feel that familiar guilt that always came after thinking the worst of people. Honestly, was it too late to start thinking of Jake as a friend? Would Dirk ever forgive her hypocrisy if she did? He was just so… _sweet_ sometimes.

“Sorry about it, Jakey,” she said as he returned her to her feet. “I’ve been feeling a bit shitty about it, to be honest. How… how was Dirk? When you left?” she asked tentatively.

Jake wilted a little. “Not in top shape, I can say that much! He was really kicking himself for upsetting you.”

Roxy chewed her lip anxiously. “Fuck,” she breathed out, knowing how stuck Dirk could get in his own head about these things. Of _course_ he’d be beating himself up about what had happened; Dirk _always_ blamed himself for everything that went wrong, even when this was clearly more Roxy’s fault than his.

“Um, this is really great and all, a very touching reunion,” Jade interrupted, “but would anyone like to join me in asking what the fuck is going on here? How did you just disappear and reappear like that? How do you two know each other?”

John raised his hand to indicate that he would, in fact, like to join Jade in so asking.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” Rose said, a gleam in her eye.

 

After a great deal of explaining and the creation and dissolution of several Perfectly Generic Objects, Jade and John excused themselves. Roxy had learned a bit about them over the course of the hour and a half the group had been working towards a plan for keeping Roxy under Betty’s radar while she was working as Jane’s bodyguard.

For one, she learned that Jade had been recruited as a geneticist for the ectobiology labs. Jade’s aptitude for writing genetic code had brought the Empress’s attention to the Witch of Space, who had joined on the team of elite ectobiologists after school only to discover that much of the genetic work that the Empress had them doing was quite nefarious. Betty was trying to get her biologists to tweak the genetic code for Signless children in order to produce more who can pass through the conversion process and into Midnight Crew members without dying or being otherwise injured and maimed. That was how she had gotten into the business of smuggling children around Skaia.

John was a technician in the lab where Jade worked, and had caught her sneaking a deaf Midnight Crew reject from the lab. He had quickly joined her cause, and had used his long-standing friendship with Dave as an in with Rose.

Jake was part of the little group because he was related through adoption to Jade. Although Space was a much higher Aspect caste than Hope, Jade’s adoptive parents were a rare pairing that defied caste rules for marriage, her mother being a Thief of Space and her father a Witch of Hope. Jake’s parents (who Roxy learned were long dead) had both been Hope Aspects, and his mother was Jade’s aunt, making the two cousins. Jake had lived with Jade for a while as a kid, but when he had coincidentally developed a friendship with Jane Crocker, he had eventually gone to live with her at the Empress’s palace.

Unlike Jane, he hated the Empress. Roxy recalled the face he had made when she had asked him a week or two ago (had it really only been a week or two since Jake had come to Earth?) about Jane and Betty’s relationship, and that he had called Betty ‘cruel.’ So when Jake had caught Jade acting dodgy about a child Jake knew Betty was looking for, he had cajoled the truth out of her over time and was now working in cahoots with Rose to bring an end to Betty’s reign.

After Jade and John left, Jake lingered. “Now, Rose,” he began, looking uncomfortable, “I really don’t want to be a bother, and it seems to me that you have quite enough on your plate without having to also deal with my codswallop. In fact, one might go so far as to say you have the most irons in the fire of all of us!”

Rose raised an eyebrow. “Not that I do not appreciate a good rambling from time to time, Jake,” she said drily, “since you’re far from the only one among us prone to such things. But, please, say what it is you want.”

He grinned sheepishly. “Might I have a few moments to talk with Roxy, alone?”

“Of course. Dave will be right outside if you need him.”

She left, Dave following her, the two bickering about whether or not Dave would actually be staying behind to guard the door.

“What’s this super secret Ambassador/Shadow business, J?” Roxy asked, wary. She was afraid he’d ask her to promise not to hurt Jane, or threaten her that if she did hurt Jane, he’d avenge her, or something of that nature.

“Well, er. You see… it’s a bit embarrassing, really, Roxy, but. Nothing risked, nothing gained! That’s what my old Gramma used to say, at any rate.” He sighed, looking at his half-eaten cake a bit dismally.

“Jake?” Roxy prompted after a minute.

He looked up to meet her eyes, an earnest and scared expression quickly fading into a bashful smile as he glanced away again. “Right! Er, the thing is. You’ve, ah. Ahem.” He cleared his throat, steeled himself, and tried again. “You’ve known Strider a long time, right?”

Oh, this was about _Dirk._ Roxy relaxed, grinning. “Our whole lives,” she said.

“Yes, that’s just what I thought you’d say! And the thing is, well, he’s quite a hunk of heartbreak, isn’t he?”

Jake’s face was red under his brown skin, and his eyes flitted back and forth from Roxy’s nervously. She blinked at him. “If that’s your way of saying he has a choice ass, then, yeah, sure,” she said, enjoying the way he squirmed at her blunt language.

“Just so, just so,” he said, trying and failing to look casual. “Well, I couldn’t help but notice his, er, as you say, ‘choice ass,’ and much more, the last few times I’ve been to Earth. And it was such a doozy of a feeling when this last visit, he seemed to maybe reciprocate!”

Roxy grinned slyly. “Well, that’s one way to toot your own horn about your own choice ass.”

“Now, wait a minute!” Jake sputtered, hands coming up in a defensive gesture.

“Relax, Jakey,” she crooned. “Just teasin’. You were saying? About your mutual choice-ass-appreciation with my bestie?”

He drooped. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? He’s your best friend, and I couldn’t help but notice.” A pause. “Roxy, you can be honest with me. Do you disapprove of me as a potential match for Dirk?”

Roxy stared at him, a little dumbfounded. “Well, of course I do,” she blurted out, surprised by his question.

“O-oh. I. I guess… I guess I’m not that surprised, I’m not nearly good enough for—”

“Jake,” Roxy interrupted. “You’re… there’s nothing wrong with _you_.” He looked up, brow furrowed. “But, really, have you thought about what a relationship with Dirk would mean? How would you even _have_ a relationship? Dirk is Earthstuck and you’re Skybound. Would you write letters? Pine for each other and wait for the day the Empress sends you back to Earth for another few days? Keep your relationship hidden so Betty never finds out, because we both know she would never approve of a Noble being with a Low Aspect—even a Prince of Heart?”

Jake looked absolutely miserable as she spoke, slumping over the table and running his hands through his hair in an agitated way. He rubbed at his forehead as he spoke. “Of course I… the thing is, Roxy, I… well, dag-blast it, I really like the fellow, alright? I know being together would be miserable, but it’s already miserable being apart! What am I supposed to do? This constant state of in-betweenness has me on tenterhooks, and I just want to _know_ how he feels, and what could come of it all! Is that so bad? Am I such a knave for wanting that?”

Roxy thought about Dirk’s gentle glances at the Page, the blushes and laughs. She thought about how he brought Jake into his inner sanctum, showing him his woodworking and their paintings, and it felt like… it felt like someone lit a whole bunch of candles in the middle of a dark room, and what she had taken for looming enemies were in fact beautiful sculptures. Dirk had opened up to Jake, had included him in their private lives, because he wanted to share it all with him, wanted to show Jake the best parts of his life, let him be privy to the things Dirk loved most. And what Dirk loved most was… Roxy, and their friendship.

She bit her lip, but it was too late. Tears welled in her eyes and she rubbed at them quickly, turning her face away.

“Gadzooks! I didn’t mean to upset you!” Jake said hurriedly. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No,” she mumbled, her face in her hands. “I’ve been the worst friend and Dirk deserves better.” She sniffed and finally looked back to Jake, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “I think… he deserves you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See? Roxy can be friends with people! :( Poor Roxy, she is learning a lot the hard way. Picking the title for this chapter took forever. If I could find a better word to capture the sentiment of "learning the hard way" or "slow, unpleasant road to learning," I'd use it. Feel free to suggest alternatives in the comments if you think of something perfect lol, but I am dedicated to making every chapter title just one word.
> 
> Also, at the beginning of the chapter, I just want to clarify that Roxy is treating her coping mechanism of cutting open her arm lightly because she wants to avoid thinking about it, not because I as an author don't grasp how serious cutting is. Roxy's avoidance and poor coping mechanisms definitely constitute an intentional theme that we'll be seeing unfold more as we go.
> 
> Time skip next chapter! We should be seeing our favorite Heart Aspect very soon! ;)
> 
> As always, your kudos and comments make my day! (No really, it's an absolute joy!)


	8. Splintered

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POV Dirk because I couldn't resist. Hope yall don't mind? I think this will be the only exception to the POV Roxy rule.

Dirk Strider had a massive fucking headache.

It was approaching midnight as he finally, _finally_ collapsed face first onto his bed, not even bothering to shrug off the fancy robes made from some material he didn’t give a fuck about that would undoubtedly be wrinkled beyond hope in the morning.

He gave himself a good minute and a half of laying there, still-shod feet dangling uncomfortably off the edge of the bed, face pressed awkwardly into the blankets, before his hatred for his own bullshit overpowered his self-pity.

With an exhausted groan that escaped only because he was alone in his bedroom, he shoved himself upward and forced himself to go through his nighttime rituals. Shoes, stowed. Robes, hung (to be gathered for washing by servants tomorrow morning). Teeth, scrubbed.

As he towel-dried his face after wiping away the day’s collection of grime and sweat, he looked up into the mirror above the water basin. He met his own eyes in the mirror, noticing the dark circles that hung heavily beneath them, the blond eyebrows that he kept pristinely plucked, the tiniest beginning of a wrinkle at the outer corners. Not laugh lines.

He stared himself down for a minute, pondering the face in the mirror that was utterly familiar and yet foreign to him. Separate. Beyond. And then he grimaced at the self-indulgent stare and braced his weight on the counter, hanging his head wearily. If there was a bottom to the deep, cavernous hole that was his antipathy for his own predisposition for introspection, he hadn’t found it yet.

 _Maybe tonight, let’s just go to bed,_ a quiet inner monologue began. _Torturing yourself seems redundant after the day you’ve had._

He stood up straight and frowned at himself. "Nah, bro," he said to his reflection. "Gotta stay sharp." He couldn't lose control of himself. He couldn’t be weak. He couldn’t be soft. Not again. And it all started with giving in to his self-pitying side, so. Not today.

He turned his back on the mirror and focused. He felt his soul, the central essence of himself, coursing through his body in constant, humming motion, tangled and infinitely complex, and he sliced at it.

He opened his eyes and, despite facing away from the mirror, stared at himself.

“What’s on the menu tonight, bro?” he asked himself. “Hope it isn’t anything that takes too long to cook because I’m tired and don’t have time to wait for a fucking casserole to bake.”

“Tomorrow, we’ll see Roxy,” the other Dirk replied, cutting off what Dirk-1 regretfully noted would have been a very pleasing digression about casseroles.

But he was right. Dirk Strider, Prince of Heart, the Empress’s vicarious ruler for Earth, would be the first ever Low Aspect to visit Skaia by invitation. Of course, Roxy, Rogue that she was, had stolen the opportunity to be the first ever Low Aspect to survive a visit to Skaia. Not that he was especially jealous of this questionable achievement.

“Yeah. Jake said she was excited that she’d be seeing me soon when he was here last week to help me prepare for the trip.”

Dirk-2 scoffed. “Unlikely. He was just saying that to be nice to us, since apparently we need to be handled with kiddie gloves. Pathetic, that we couldn’t even find a way to get to Skaia before now and tell her for ourself that we’re sorry. Had to ask a man she hates to tell her for us.”

Dirk-1 frowned. “Look, I’m all about self-flagellation. In fact, I’ve submitted my application to be considered for the Self-Flagellate Hall of Fame, and am expecting my notification of induction any day now. And even still, I have a hard time buying that accelerating the timeline and making my way to Skaia early would have helped anything.” He turned and made his way back to the bedroom.

“Roxy has forgotten about us by now,” Dirk-2 answered, following doggedly at his heels. “It’s been a month and she’s been off adventuring on Skaia like she always wanted, away from the job _we_ stuck her with that she hated. After the way we fucked up and ran her off, why would she even bother wasting her time on us anymore?”

Dirk-1 sat on the bed and clamped down on the dread filling his heart. “Say it,” he demanded.

“She’s over us for good,” Dirk-2 said immediately. “She’s spent the month with Jake and the two of them have forgotten us. Hell, he’s probably realized he really does only like women and they’re up there in the Empress’s palace doing the nasty as we speak.” 

“That doesn’t even make sense. Roxy hates Jake.”

“Sure it does. Roxy hates _you_ and she knows you like Jake. She wants to punish you, as she very well should. And Jake, well. An attractive man like him, who likes women? He wouldn’t say no to Roxy. It’d be fitting, for our crush and our best friend to decide the only thing better than dumping our ass is doing so by fucking each other silly.” Dirk-2 shook his head.

Dirk-1 growled with frustration and in a moment of poor judgment, fractured himself again.

“Really?” Dirk-3 sighed. “This is how we’re going to spend our night? Making up far-fetched stories about a Noble we’d like to fuck, and our best friend who hates us?” He turned a skeptical look on Dirk-1. "What were you thinking, splintering us again?"

"I was _hoping_ you'd be the voice of reason and side with me against this asshole," Dirk-1 answered, gesturing vaguely in Dirk-2's direction. The three pieces of himself stared at each other, glancing back and forth between each identical, pale face, and then Dirk-2 snickered, and Dirk-1 slumped. "Right, what was I thinking."

"No wonder everyone abandons us," Dirk-2 said, still snickering. 

Dirk-3 rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to Dirk-2. "As I was saying. Don't we have better things to do than spinning endlessly more outlandish tales about how much Roxy hates us?"

Dirk-2 smirked. “Like what? What could we possibly have to say tonight that would help us prepare for the shitshow tomorrow is going to be?”

With a shrug, Dirk-3 said, “I dunno, literally _anything_ except the bullshit we’re currently vomiting out of our collective trash chutes?”

Dirk-2 rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s a really helpful comment. Don’t want talk about Roxy and our destroyed friendship, or Jake and how we’ve undoubtedly ruined our chances with him? Fine. Shall we just coddle ourselves like the pathetic asshole we are, and pretend like everything is hunky-dory?”

“Pathetic,” Dirk repeated in a whisper, unable to tolerate the bickering out loud anymore and snapping his three splinters together into the body already sitting on the bed. He blew out the candle on his nightstand and lay atop the blankets, exhausted in body and spirit. Awake anyway. Just because the splinters were united corporeally didn’t mean the argument had stopped.

His headache worsened.

 

The shuttle ride was one of the most disconcerting experiences of Dirk’s life. Skaia had sent a passenger shuttle for him, along with several Signless servants to load and unload his supplies. Dirk had technically never appointed a new Shadow in the wake of Roxy’s leaving (though Caterina had informally taken over many of her duties), so he had come to Skaia alone, leaving the daily tasks of governance in Caterina’s capable, though relatively unofficial, hands. He would have brought his own servants and entourage, but Jake’s last visit had made it clear that while Roxy would have been an exception as his state-recognized second-in-command, other Low Aspects would not be tolerated on Skaia by Her Imperial Majesty.

So the Signless servants had directed him on the proper place to sit, and how to brace himself for take-off and landing, clearly even more uncomfortable with the whole affair than he was. He supposed that they had never had to tell a traveling dignitary how to properly brace himself during a shuttle ride before.

Unsure of what else to do, he had just sat awkwardly in his chair during the whole ride. Now that the shuttle was docked, he glanced surreptitiously at the Signless servants in the rear of the cabin to follow their lead. Sure enough, they were undoing the clasps on the restraints that kept them from getting thrown about during the stomach-wrenching docking process.

Dirk carefully undid his own, withholding the relieved sigh he wanted to give at finally being free of the bonds. He understood why they were necessary, but he had never liked tight spaces or otherwise having his movement restricted.

He stood, then brushed his white-gloved hands over the formal travel clothing he wore today, making sure there were no wrinkles. The double-breasted maroon coat with squared shoulder was laced by an abundance of fine silver chains, and a knee-length cape of the same reddish purple color was fastened to each epaulette with a silver Heart Aspect pin, the divided heart crowned with the tri-peaked Prince Class crown.

His pants were an ostentatious white tucked into black riding boots, which were decorated with silver filigree down the sides. At his hip hung a thin, decorative rapier, fancy silver handle sparkling above a scabbard along which ran a tasteful line of evenly spaced diamonds and garnets. The thing would not do him any good in combat, and he despised it, but not quite as much as he despised being without a weapon altogether. Jake had been clear about the Empress's wish that Dirk come with ornamental weapons befitting of his station only, so it had been this legendary piece of shit or nothing. He had taken the legendary piece of shit.

Nestled into his white-blond hair was a silver crown that was the same in shape as the stylized crown of his sigil; a solid piece with three peaks in perfect symmetry, two low ones to either side and a taller one in the center. The last time he had worn this was on the day the priests had come down from Skaia to swear him in as the newest Seat of Spirit.

Dirk had added a few ornaments of his own to the formal attire; a latticework silver cuff earring on the cartilage of his left ear, garnet studs in both earlobes, and silver bands with garnets on several of the fingers of each hand. Only the signet ring on his left hand was technically part of the formal outfit; Caterina had frowned disapprovingly at Dirk’s jewelry choices, no doubt wishing he would keep to the strictly ceremonial pieces. But hey, he had just frowned back and she had turned meek as a mouse.

He stood before the door, waiting for the servants to open it, and was momentarily keenly aware that Skaia’s first glimpse of him would be an impressive sight.

The hatch lowered, and he shielded his eyes with a hand held to his brow as light flooded into the cabin. When he could see again, he began the descent down a sturdy but thin wooden bridge.

Quite a crowd was gathered, though it seemed a good number of the people present were unsuspecting bystanders who had come for some other business but stopped to observe when they had noticed the rare appearance of one of the Life Aspects heading this entourage.

And indeed, waiting for him at the bottom of the steps was the Inheritor of the Life Throne herself, Jane Crocker. She was resplendent in a red silk gown, her dark skin modestly covered from her chin and ankles though the sleeves covered only her shoulders. Golden bangles adorned her arms from wrist to elbow, and a winding gold armlet held rubies and emeralds in the Life Aspect flare on her right upper arm between bangles and sleeve. In her short, tightly curled black hair, a golden tiara with matching gemstones adorned her head.

Dirk and Jane sized each other up for a brief moment before he let his eyes flick to the others around her, even as he continued down the bridge to the landing. He almost stopped short as his eyes landed on Jake, looking quite dashing in his own formal attire, but what really stopped his heart was the sight of Roxy, peering over Jane’s shoulder, her blond hair in an outrageous updo that almost made him laugh right then and there. Christ, she must have hated having to wear her hair like that.

But he didn’t stop, nor even crack a smile. There were appearances to uphold.

At the bottom of the bridge, he stepped onto firm ground with inner relief, hand on the hilt of his sword, and bowed to Jane. “Your Highness,” he greeted her. “I am at your service.”

“Prince Strider,” Jane replied, a kindness to her voice he had not expected. “Rise. You are most welcome on the Floating Isle of Skaia.”

 

Dirk was desperate for a chance to talk to Roxy, but the day was filled with the usual formalities; gift exchanges, lunches, small talk, tours, entertainment.

By the time the evening rolled around, Dirk was ready to collapse, but there was a ball being held in his honor. Now, Jane was dancing with a Seer of Time, having already had her formal first dance with Dirk, who had immediately retreated to the back of the room when his obligatory dancing was done. Roxy was nowhere to be seen.

“Alright there, mate?” a most welcome voice said at his shoulder.

Dirk turned to see Jake smiling at him, holding out a glass of cool water for the Prince. Dirk let his fingers brush against Jake’s as he accepted the drink. Jake’s smile faltered a bit, wide eyes flickering up to Dirk’s, then away again as red stained his cheeks.

Dirk's breath caught in his throat at the sight. Fuck, he was fucking fucked.

They both felt it when the silence stretched too long. 

“Too bad Her Majesty isn’t around for the festivities,” Dirk commented after taking a long pull of water.

Jake jumped on the conversation topic with plain relief. “Indeed! She was supposed to be back just days after my last visit to Earth, but sent word that the Prospitian ectobiology labs needed more extensive overseeing than she had realized. Hence her belated return to Skaia.”

Dirk nodded, kind of listening but also kind of just using the moment as an excuse to let himself unclench like… at least four of his eternally clenched muscles. Jake had a way of doing that, putting him at ease.

They were tucked away in a corner, since Dirk had retreated as far from the crowd as possible, and most people here knew who Jake was and would have realized by now that he was literally the only person on Skaia with whom Dirk had _any_ familiarity or relationship whatsoever. So nobody begrudged them the moment of quiet with each other. Nobody looked at them and smirked knowingly, or even seemed to care that the guest of honor had sequestered himself away from the crowd and dancing with the Ambassador.

Perhaps this was what gave Jake the courage to lean in a little and brush a hand along the cuff earring Dirk wore, murmuring, “This is pretty,” as his hand trailed down the Prince’s ear and lingered a second too long in the soft, short hairs at the base of Dirk's neck.

Dirk’s body seemed to vibrate with energy, the same way it felt in the seconds between deciding to split himself into splinters and actually succeeding at doing so, like his very core was somehow elevated, surfacing to his skin from wherever it normally hid.

“Thanks,” he managed to reply, throat oddly dry despite the now empty cup of water in his hand. “I figured I was already going to be paraded around like Skaia’s favorite show pony, why not up the ante a little and adorn myself like the goddamn debutante I am, let the Nobles really see my inner beauty.”

Jake chuckled. “An earring isn’t what makes the difference, there, mate,” he said, smiling in a way that made a shiver run down Dirk’s spine.

“Well,” Dirk drawled, turning a bit to face Jake more directly and cocking an eyebrow at him, “what’s gotten into you?”

Jake immediately withdrew a step, expression morphing from what Dirk thought Roxy would call ‘bedroom eyes’ to something more like a deer caught in a hunter’s rifle scope. “I- I didn’t mean to—well, it’s just—”

Dirk hadn’t meant to scare him away; it was, in fact, the last thing he wanted to do. He didn't think about it, just reached out and snatched one of Jake’s hands in his own, desperate not to let this moment pass so soon. “Do you want to dance?” he asked, holding Jake’s hand lightly, tugging just a little toward the dance floor.

“I—what?”

“Listen, bro, this is a one time deal, last season's Strider Dances, on clearance for just a few sultry glances. Each dance comes with a large side of unwanted snickers and speculation from the peanut gallery. Yours for the low price of one turn around the dance floor.”

Jake laughed, his hand twisting in Dirk’s to grip his palm. “Your Excellency,” he said with a mock-formal bow—well, Dirk’s return bow was mock formal, but knowing Jake, his was sincere—“I would be delighted.”

Dirk dropped his water cup on a table as he let Jake lead him out to the dance floor, and as the orchestra struck up a new waltz, the broad-shouldered Noble placed a hand on Dirk’s waist and gave him three quick sways to the beat before sweeping him out among the other dancers. Dirk and Jake were hardly the only same-sex couples dancing; taboos over such things were but surprising footnotes in the history books these days, since ectobiology had completely replaced organic modes of reproduction in the early years of Betty's rule. While interpersonal touching and closeness between male friends was still rarer than between female friends, it was normal enough that their dance wouldn’t immediately cue outraged backlash.

No, if there was some danger to their growing mutual affection being discovered, it was based on the gap between their castes. While inter-caste romance was not exactly forbidden within the Noble or Low castes, it was solidly within the realm of “impossible and punishable by death” for a Noble and Low Aspect to court each other.

Perhaps this very fact also protected them; Dirk was a visiting dignitary, Jake an ambassador and friend. Their dance would be seen as friendly, perhaps business-related, like Dirk’s dance with Jane had been. And if the Prince’s face was a bit flushed, well, the exertion of dancing after a long day would make anyone with skin so fair turn a bit red. And if Jake’s hand was a touch too low on Dirk’s back, well, Jake had never been the most polished when it came to etiquette—it was part of his charm.

The downside to not being seen as an actual couple was that apparently this was everyone’s cue that Dirk was back in the game and before the first waltz was even up, a woman in a pale pink gown cut in and took Jake’s spot, her Time Aspect flanked by Sylph wings pendant the only marker of her caste or Class. Jake reluctantly let her in, then found another dance partner, a Witch of Space that he seemed to know well.

Dirk tried to focus on his dance partners as they came and went, but he had so very little interest in any of them. In actuality, the heartless dances that were dragged out of him one after the other just gave his brain time to catch up with itself, and even as he made polite overtures of conversation on the outside, he was busy tearing into himself on the inside. 

Stupid, stupid, _stupid_ to indulge in a moment of being candid with his affection for Jake, even if it was a relief that the Page of Hope didn’t seem to hate him as he had feared. Now what? Now, Jake would expect his guard to be down, would come back with that same look and touch and, and… and fuck, Dirk wanted that so badly (stupid, pathetic, undisciplined), yet he also dreaded the moment it was over and they had to go their separate ways (gross, bro, are you even listening to yourself, what is this, one of Roxy’s trashy romance novels she read when you were teenagers?).

He paused as yet another woman cut in, wearing Breath blue, her blond hair curled around her face, but Dirk barely even looked at her as his current dance partner gracefully stepped away and he brought his hands up to receive the next.

“Such a sourpuss expression,” Roxy said with a grin as she eagerly stepped into his arms.

His eyes snapped back to her face, though he quickly schooled the shock that was plainly evident back into his usual stoic glare. “Roxy,” he whispered, pulling her close. For the briefest of seconds, his arm snaked around her back and hers across his shoulder, a hug that gave away far, far too much (he couldn’t possibly know her, or anyone here besides Jake, well enough for such a greeting). The all-too-fleeting embrace felt like when he brought his splintered soul back into a singular body.

She sniffled a little as he started to lead her out onto the dance floor. “I’ve missed you so much Di-Stri,” she said quietly, smiling up at him, and one of the tendrils of anxiety that kept a tight hold on his heart eased away. They danced easily together, having been each other’s primary learning partners all through their school years.

“You have?” he asked, surprised.

“Well, duh,” she said, rolling her eyes. Her expression turned serious, cautious. “Dirk, I… I’m so sorry for running away, and for all the horrible things I said.”

He missed a beat and almost stepped on her toe, but recovered a step or two later. “ _You’re_ sorry?” he asked, shaking his head. “Rox, I was such an ass, kicking you out, not really listening to what you were trying to tell me. I assure you, if one of us needs to be apologizing, it’s me.”

“No,” she said firmly, frowning at him. “I mean, sure, you can be sorry, and rest assured you’re entirely and always forgiven. But… I really fucked up, Dirk. I was being so selfish, and… and Dirk, I really like Jake.”

His heart clenched. Had he misread Jake’s intentions earlier? God, probably, what an ego he had, thinking Jake was interested in him. He really _was_ just bad at etiquette. “I… that’s great, Roxy. Are… you going to stay on Skaia to be with him?”

She gaped. “What?”

“I mean, I thought you hated him, but I guess I was just misreading—”

And then she burst out laughing, stumbling to a halt, her head pressed against his shoulder as she giggled. “Oh my _god_ you big dork, you’re so dumb. No, I mean I like him as a friend, and I like him for _you_. He’s a good person, Dirk, and if you… care for him, and he cares for you, then.” She took a deep breath and smiled up at him. “Then I’m happy for you, even if I think it’s gonna be a nightmare tryin’ to see each other when you live on Earth and he lives on Skaia.”

“Really?” he asked after a pause in which he just stared at her, slack jawed.

“Yes, you oaf!” she said, smacking at his shoulder.

Just then, the man in question appeared, frowning a bit. Jake put a hand on each of their backs and led them off the dance floor, murmuring as they went about drawing too much attention and people wondering what exactly was going on between the Prince of Heart and that random Breath Aspect.

Roxy promised Dirk they’d talk more later, and disappeared into the crowd. Jake and Dirk were left by themselves back near where the Page had first sought out the Prince earlier in the evening.

Before either mustered up the courage to say something, though, a hush fell over the room—even the orchestra stopped playing. Dirk was on guard immediately, scanning the crowd to see what had caused the sudden silence, and saw people were sinking into deep bows and curtsies, remaining low to the ground, as a woman entered the ballroom. His first thought was that perhaps Betty had returned and was making a grand entrance, but, no, this was someone entirely different.

Despite standing quite far from the grand entry, Dirk could not mistake the cut of a Seer’s formal attire, and the bright orange and yellow of the Light aspect left little doubt as to who this woman was. He felt a deep uneasiness; despite knowing that the High Priestess was the reason he had been invited to Skaia (Jake had filled him in on some details, though he suspected not all), being in her presence after years of religious devotion to her was… overwhelming.

Even Jane was curtsied low, head bowed toward the ground.

The High Priestess stopped near the center of the room, and people backed out of her line of sight until there was nobody in the path between her and Dirk. Dirk felt Jake press a hand into his back, and turned to see the Ambassador to Earth was bowed at the waist—in fact, Dirk seemed to be the only person besides the few who had arrived with the Seer of Light not genuflecting. Jake nevertheless peered up at Dirk, widening his eyes and tilting his head pointedly toward the High Priestess, adding more pressure at his back. Dirk got the message.

He could hear the ringing of his bootheels striking the floor as he walked forward to meet the High Priestess.

Someone else was taking note of his approach. A Knight of Time, lightly armored and dressed in refreshingly practical attire, hand on a _real_ sword, stood at the High Priestess’s back. Dirk couldn’t see much of his face, as his eyes were hidden behind a pair of spectacles with darkened lenses, the likes of which he had never seen before.

 _Note to self,_ he thought. _Get me some of those._

A few feet before the Seer of Light, Dirk stopped and sank to one knee, bowing his head as his hand rested on the hilt of his sword. “Your Holiness,” he said. “I am your humble servant.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted them DirkJake feels T-T and couldn't figure out a natural way to have it happen with Roxy as our only POV. I hope you enjoyed the Strider manpain (my favorite flavor of manpain) and didn't find the outfit descriptions too tedious? I'm aware I spent a lot of time on Dirk's outfit especially, but I just love this image of him dressed in such an imposing, formal outfit, almost warrior-like, as the shuttle door drops and the gathered crowd sees their *first ever* Low Aspect and he's regal, and imposing, and just. Yeah.
> 
> Lots to catch up on with Roxy next chapter!


	9. Respite

When Rose had entered the ballroom, Roxy had quickly made her way to Jane’s side before joining the rest of the crowd in her humble curtsy. Also, fuck curtsying. It was super uncomfortable.

She watched from behind Jane’s shoulder as Dirk strode down the impromptu aisle to bow on one knee before Rose, and she couldn’t stop the proud grin that plastered itself on her face as she watched him. Damn, he was _fine._ His confident gait and stoic expression made even _Roxy_ , who was used to such things from Dirk, shiver a little with impressed anticipation. Even with his perfectly executed formal bow to Rose, he looked like a fuckin’ king. Which, she supposed, he more or less was.

When Jane rose from her curtsy, Roxy did, too. John was there, standing up straight from his bow, his bright blue eyes twinkling with excitement as he glanced at Roxy knowingly. She couldn’t help but grin back. All these schemes, all this work and planning, and finally, _finally_ , the last piece was in place. Dirk was here.

It was surreal, really, watching Dirk and Rose greet each other, her two closest companions (though of course, one for considerably more time than the other). Roxy and John each got a day off once a week, and Roxy always spent her free time with Rose. She would bring treats for Marcus and the other children, work all day in Can Town with them and sometimes Jade, Dave, or Jake, depending on who else was free. Then at night she and Rose would settle in with a bottle of wine and shoot the shit (Roxy’s phrase) before passing out side-by-side in Rose's bed.

So yeah, seeing her best bro and new sis in the same place, making the usual gestures of greeting, was singularly thrilling.

Jane started forward now, and Roxy and John fell easily in step behind her. When the three of them reached Rose’s party and Jane curtsied again, her bodyguards were careful to make their own genuflections deeper and longer than the Inheritor’s.

“Rise, dear Jane,” Rose said, smiling. Then she looked around her and loudly announced, “Rise, all! Let the orchestra play and dancing resume!”

As the ball attendees all stood up straight and the orchestra players returned to their seats, Rose said to the group before her, “Let’s go to the balcony so we may all speak easily.”

The walk to the balcony was slow, since Rose and Jane both had to stop and exchange pleasantries with various powerful people, and Dirk was shaking hands and bowing and smiling and generally being a good little visiting Earthstuck governor. Roxy fell in step next to Dave, who hung back a little to walk with her.

“Your bro looks like a fuckin’ peacock,” Dave muttered.

Roxy punched his shoulder lightly. “Rude. Respect the man’s wishes; I’m sure he’d rather be called a show pony,” she whispered back, and Dave squinted at her, trying to see if she was joking.

Jake jogged to catch up with them, and took up position on Roxy’s other side. “What an impression the governor is making,” he said, eyes glued to the back of Dirk’s head, expression a bit… dopey. Roxy watched Dave frown a little, eyes cutting between Jake’s puppy-eyed stare and the blond silhouette in front of him.

A tiny smile tweaked at one corner of the Knight’s mouth. “Nnnooo,” he said, looking to Roxy. The single word was more like a question, a little disbelieving, a little expectant.

“Oh, yes,” she said, rolling her eyes and grinning even wider. “Very, very yes. It’s painful, really.”

Dave’s smirk grew. “Yo, English,” he said, looking over Roxy’s head at the Page. “You gonna show Prince Strider _all_ the sights tonight?”

Roxy snickered. Jake turned a confused frown their way, flicking his eyes between Rogue and Knight as though hoping one would clarify the joke. “I…?” he said.

“Make him feel really… welcome? And comfortable?”

“Not too comfortable, I hope, where’s the fun in that? You know Dirk ain't no pillow prince.” Roxy muttered, and she and Dave snickered together this time, bumping fists.

“Wait, what are you—”

“Is he gonna be on top—of the world?” Dave asked.

“I say, Sir Dave, if you’re suggesting—”

Roxy slipped her arm into Jake’s and patted at his elbow comfortingly. “Now, now, Jake, I’m sure Dave is just doing his Knightly duty and making sure you’re planning to be properly protected when you take the Prince—out.”

“Roxy,” Jake groaned, stopping and anchoring her outside the doors to the balcony that they were finally approaching, so that the two of them and Dave were a bit separate from the rest of the group. “It isn’t safe to say such things,” he whispered, and Roxy’s mirth turned sour as she remembered just how much trouble Jake and Dirk could get in if discovered. It was one thing to rib friends about their crushes, and another to do so in the context of a society whose laws found their budding love a crime against nature. Her and Dave's joking could be the difference between someone not even noticing the closeness between Dirk and Jake, and becoming suspicious of it. Like pointing to the smoke while trying to conceal the fire.

Dave seemed to be thinking this for the first time, and ran a hand through his hair, puffing out his cheeks as he exhaled. “Shit, man,” he said, his own eyes scanning the group on the balcony and lingering a moment too long on John. Roxy had puzzled out quite some time ago that Dave had a thing for the Heir of Breath, but also that John seemed… well. Oblivious. Maybe he was thinking about how much it sucked to want something you couldn’t have. “Sorry.”

Jake let out a sigh, looking properly distressed as he turned anxious eyes to Roxy. “What do I even do?” he whispered, plainly scared. Her heart clenched and she reached out to hold his hand as he took a deep breath before continuing. “He’s _here_ , he’s on Skaia, and I want to show him everything, take him everywhere. I want him to see my city like I do, and meet the people I love, and try my favorite foods, and… and tomorrow he’ll be busy with Jane, and the next day, and the next… until he goes back to Earth, and I… stay here.”

“I know, Jakey,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Maybe… maybe Jane can change things, make it better for you two.” Even as she said it, she doubted it. In the last month, Roxy had learned to respect the many virtues Jane had—she was kind to a fault, generous and compassionate, driven to succeed and determined never to quit. But she was not very open-minded, and her desperate need to please Betty had resulted in a streak of cruelty and some deeply internalized prejudice against Low castes and low Classes. This last was especially painful to observe, given that Jane’s own Class was the one she respected least.

Perhaps Jane’s rule would result in much improved circumstances for many people; children would no longer be hunted or forced through heinous conversion processes at the throne’s whim, she would see to improved education on Earth _and_ Skaia, and undoubtedly relax many of Betty’s strict social laws of decorum and forced loyalty to the empire. But Roxy had her doubts that Jane would be accepting of a relationship between a Noble—a man she loved as her brother, no less—and a Low Aspect.

Jake, though, looked hopeful, brightening a bit. “By golly,” he said, smiling at her, “perhaps she will!”

He turned and made his way to the balcony. Dave and Roxy exchanged troubled frowns before Dave patted her arm and followed the Page. Roxy wondered if it had ever occurred to Jake that if Jane learned he had conspired to kill her mother, she would never forgive him. Roxy had yet to meet Betty; apparently this close to adoption season, she spent most of her time in the ectobiology labs scattered throughout the caverns of the three Floating Isles, making sure things were proceeding to her liking. Jane talked about her mother with a mixture of fondness and unease, in one moment demonstrating an eager desire to please the Empress, and in the next, frustration over the woman’s unyielding and selfish nature. But it was painfully clear that Jane loved Betty fiercely, loved the _possibility_ of her mother more than the woman herself, and would not look kindly upon her friends' conspiracy to kill her.

Shaking her head to clear it, Roxy followed Dave onto the balcony and took up her spot behind Jane’s chair with John.

“And of course, you already know Jake,” Jane was saying, and Dirk and Jake smiled at each other, before Jane continued, “This is Jade Harley, Witch of Space. She’s one of our foremost ectobiologists, a true visionary in genetics, and a friend.” Roxy hadn’t noticed Jade joining them, but was glad she had. Jade waved enthusiastically at Dirk, who bowed a little in his seat to her. “My bodyguards, John Egbert, Heir of Breath,” Jane continued.

“Hi!” John said, just as enthusiastic as Jade.

“And Roxy Lalonde, Rogue of Breath,” Jane finished.

“Prince Strider,” Roxy said, stifling a grin as she dipped a quick curtsy.

“I believe we shared a dance today, Rogue Lalonde,” he said, his voice thick with humor.

“Which leaves,” Rose interjected, before the two Low Aspects got carried away, “my closest companion and Captain of the Light Guard, Dave, Knight of Time.”

“Just Dave?” Dirk asked, as he inclined his head respectfully to the looming Knight, who had taken a standing position behind Rose's chair.

“Members of the Light Aspect and those chosen at birth to serve them do not receive family names,” Rose explained.

“What’s with the glasses?” Dirk asked curiously.

Dave pushed the darkened lenses up his nose a little. “What, bro, you think I can go out in public without these and not get mobbed? Nah, I step outside the Temple and it’s like, bam, instantly overrun by adoring fans of every Aspect and Class, begging for autographs and trying to get their hands all over this hot piece of ass.” He swept a hand up and down in front of himself, in case anyone was unsure of whose ass he spoke.

“And somehow your unique eyewear… keeps you from being noticed?” Dirk asked.

“Man, you have no idea, wearing these things makes me invisible, I’m as hard to spot as Roxy—”

Six sets of shoulders stiffened at the casual reference to Roxy’s Void powers, eyes flashing nervously toward Jane and then away. Dave clamped his mouth shut, not wanting to do any more damage, and Roxy could see a displeased twist to Rose’s mouth. But Jane just giggled.

“Hoo hoo! Yes,” she agreed, “Roxy is _quite_ stealthy when she wants to be, isn’t she? No surprise, her being a Rogue and all. It’s a very useful trait in a bodyguard!”

Everyone forced little nervous chuckles, relaxing a bit. Clearly anxious for a different topic, Jake said, “So, your Holiness, what brings you to the ball tonight?”

“I merely wished to meet our esteemed guest,” Rose replied coolly. “I have Seen much, revealed to me by the gods, about your visit, Prince Strider, and should like to steal you away from Jane for some time during your visit in the weeks to come.”

“Oh, of course,” Jane said immediately, looking impressed with Rose’s line about things being revealed by the gods. She leaned forward intently. “Can you tell us anything about these visions, Holiness?”

Rose steepled her fingers, looking thoughtful. “Dear Jane,” she murmured, and Jane was not the only one to blink in surprise at the sudden note of sadness to Rose’s voice, “I have Seen the possibility of a long and beautiful friendship between Skaia and Earth, made manifest in your own friendship with Prince Strider. Yet these visions are clouded, and remain… uncertain. In one ear the gods whisper of an era of untold good fortune and prosperity, peace and justice as we have not known in generations. In the other, I hear of ruin and chaos, Noble and Low societies alike plagued by moral atrophy, bitter war, and societal decay.”

Roxy glanced at Dirk and saw the troubled look on his face as he watched Rose with a mixture of awe and skepticism. Well, to Roxy's trained eye, this was the case. To the others, he undoubtedly looked mildly concerned at most. Jane, on the other hand, looked positively stricken. “Your Holiness,” she breathed, reaching out to clutch at Rose’s hand. “Tell me how to make the first of these visions come true.”

Rose shook her head, squeezing Jane’s hand before saying, “You must find this path forward for yourself, Jane Crocker, Maid of Life.” She paused. “Trust in your friends. Believe in yourself.”

“Live, laugh, love,” Dave intoned in a mock-serious voice, drawing incredulous stares. He waved a hand vaguely, a serene expression on his face. “Dance like no one’s watching.” John and Jade started to snicker even as Jane and Jake looked at the Knight in offense.

“Eat your vegetables,” Dirk suggested, and seven heads swiveled toward him, mouths agape. He hadn’t said much, but Roxy figured no one had expected him to feel comfortable enough to mock the High Priestess on his first night here. She certainly hadn't; then again, she wasn't too surprised, since Dirk had a quick wit and almost no fear of authority. Nobody moved, trying to gauge Rose’s reaction.

Dave grinned at the Prince for a second before wiping his expression clean. “Think before you act,” he professed, hand to heart to show his sincerity.

“Don’t shop on an empty stomach,” Dirk said, nodding sagely.

“Wear sensible shoes,” Dave suggested.

“A stitch in time saves nine,” Dirk added, purposefully getting a little off track. Jade rolled her eyes as John’s snickering grew louder. Rose was looking between Dirk and Dave with a single raised eyebrow, her amusement at the ongoing teasing putting Jane and Jake at ease.

Dave shook his head as though Dirk’s comment were sublime music, then held up a hand until everyone’s attention was on him. “Every cloud has a silver lining,” he stage-whispered dramatically.

Dirk wagged a finger at Dave, shaking his head as though he couldn’t believe how profound the Knight’s words were. “The heart wants what it wants,” he added, and this succeeded in getting some extra groans and chuckles for its pun value.

“Indeed,” Dave agreed. “But remember. Time heals all wounds.”

Everyone else was laughing now, but the matching serious expressions on Dirk and Dave’s faces never cracked. After a few more rounds of this nonsense, Rose threw her hands into the air.

“Enough!” she said, smiling broadly. “If I hear another platitude from either of you tonight, I will personally see to it that you spend the night in a dungeon.”

Dave clicked his tongue at her. “Well, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Dirk finally cracked a tiny smile. “We’re not laughing _at_ you, your Holiness.”

A pause.

“We’re laughing with you!” Jade, John, Roxy, Dave, and Dirk finished together.

 

As much as it chafed, Roxy spent the whole next day barely interacting with Dirk. She and John were posted outside conference rooms in which Jane and Dirk discussed government business, sometimes alone, sometimes with different officials or business leaders, and Roxy suddenly very much missed her Shadow privileges that would have put her on the other side of the door. The chain of office had felt like shackles on Earth, but now she tapped her foot impatiently and paced the corridor as the hours passed and Jane and Dirk remained sequestered.

Around dinnertime, Jack Noir, head of the Midnight Crew, wandered toward them.

Roxy stopped pacing and crossed her arms. “Jack,” she greeted him coolly.

His face was in its usual snarl, lip curled up distastefully. “Rogue Lalonde,” he replied. “Heir Egbert.”

“Hiya, Jack!” John said, cheerful as ever.

Jack and Roxy both rolled their eyes, then glared at each other suspiciously.

“What are you doing over here? Come to harass me for no reason again?” Roxy asked acidly.

Jack’s nose wrinkled as he looked her over. “You stink, Rogue,” he hissed. “I know you’re hidin’ somethin’, you sneak.”

“Resorting to Classist slurs now, are we Jack?” she responded coolly. “What’s next, will you say Janey is good at cleaning?”

Jack didn’t take the bait, just smirked. “You sound like someone who’s hiding something, too. Where there’s stench, there’s Low Aspect.”

“Oh, no,” Roxy fake-gasped, smacking her forehead as though just remembering something. “Of course I smell bad—how silly of me! I stashed some dead fish in my tunic pocket weeks ago. Let’s see….” She reached a hand into her pocket and moved it around as though trying to find something, then made an ‘a-ha!’ expression and pulled her hand out, revealing a raised middle finger.

John cackled.

Jack growled. “I’ll figure it out,” he promised. “And then you’ll pay.”

“Bring it on, lapdog,” she snapped, taking a menacing step toward him.

John stepped between them. “Ooookay,” he said, smiling like a dweeb, but there was a sharpness to his eyes that Roxy had learned to recognize that usually preceded something very impressive from the unassuming Heir. “That’s enough. You both have big dicks! Congratulations. Jack, do you need something?”

Jack didn’t even answer, just gave Roxy one more dirty look and then stalked off down the hallway.

John stayed close to Roxy, frowning after Jack. “He’s getting more open with his distaste for you. You haven’t done anything, y’know, _voidy_ lately?” Roxy took a leaf from Jack’s book and gave her fellow bodyguard a dirty look. He smiled when he saw it, resting a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. “Okay, okay. Just. Be careful.”

The scowl on Roxy’s face withered and she slumped a little under his comforting touch. “I know,” she said, weary. She hadn’t so much as acknowledged her Void powers during the month she’d been working for Jane, and she really missed them. She and John had contrived a few tricks wherein he used his windy powers to make it look like Roxy was actually manipulating Breath, just to secure her cover a little better. For the most part, though, Rogues of Breath didn’t have any showy or immediately impressive powers, so Roxy played up her bodyguard credentials based on her non-Aspect skills, like how rarely she missed with her rifle, her keen powers of observation, and even her proficiency with blades.

John opened his mouth to say something else, but just then the door opened behind them and the two bodyguards snapped to attention. Jane and Dirk emerged, stretching stiff muscles and looking pleased as they exchanged what was obviously the end of parting pleasantries. It was well into the evening, and Dirk requested his dinner be sent to his rooms.

“Of course,” Jane agreed, then turned to her bodyguards. “Will one of you see to it?” she asked, then had to stifle a yawn behind a hand. “Oh, excuse me. It’s been a long two days. I think I’ll just go soak in a nice bath.”

Roxy volunteered to help Dirk find his way to his rooms, and the first servant they saw she sent to the kitchens for their dinner. Food arrived to his rooms just moments after they did, and they settled in to eat together for the first time since before Roxy had stowed away on Jake’s shuttle.

“So,” Dirk said, dipping a chunk of bread in his summer chowder. “Jane.”

Roxy grinned. “I know, right? She’s incredible!”

He nodded thoughtfully. “She is. Wicked smart.”

“Yes! And she really wants to change things for the better on Earth.”

“But—”

Roxy was already nodding. “But she just doesn’t see what an evil bitch Betty is.”

Dirk sighed, sitting back in his chair and rubbing at his forehead. “There’s so much evidence to show how fucking awful she is,” he said quietly. “And Jane is so clever. How does she still believe Betty is good?”

They were silent for a moment, thinking their own thoughts as they ate.

“I remember,” Roxy said slowly, picking absently at her salad, “when Jake came to Earth the last time. Well, the last time I was there, too, which I guess is two times ago.” Dirk waved a hand, indicating he understood, so she continued. “I asked him if he liked Earth, and he said that many Skybound people have a lot of misconceptions about what life is like on Earth. And I was mad,” she said with a frown. “I didn’t want them to think we were… barbarians. Or to pity us and imagine that we all lived in hovels, fighting over scraps of stale bread.”

Dirk nodded slowly. “But?” he prompted.

Roxy set her fork down with a sigh, propping her elbow on the table and resting her head in her palm, gazing across at Dirk miserably. “But I’ve realized that… as much as Betty controls what we know about Skaia, she also controls what the Skybound know about Earth. Jane has been raised to think of Betty as the end all, be all of the whole world. I didn’t know about Derse and Prospit before coming to Skaia.” (She had told Jake to make sure Dirk knew about the other two Isles before he had left for his short second trip to Earth, not wanting the Prince to look foolish when they inevitably came up in a meeting with Jane.) "If we can go our whole lives not knowing about two entire fucking Isles, how could we possibly expect Jane to understand the Rage Quarter where we spent those awful months between you becoming a Prince and… you know, getting adopted? How can we expect her to understand when she doesn’t know?”

“Ignorance of a thing does not excuse her complicity in exploitative practices,” Dirk said, frowning.

“I agree,” Roxy said. “But it does change how harshly we judge her for it.”

They picked at the remains of their meals in silence for a minute, thinking about this. When someone knocked at the door a moment later, they looked up, immediately on guard.

“I probably shouldn’t be here,” Roxy whispered, eyes wide.

Dirk winced at the evidence, the dishes telling of a devoured spread of food too big for one person. “There’s really no reason for us to have dined together, either.”

Roxy snatched up her plate, napkin, and mug, and rushed into the bathroom, hiding herself away but careful to resist her impulse to reach for a void bubble. Jack would be on them in an instant if she did.

The knock came again, and Dirk pulled the door open a second later.

“Dirk. May I come in?”

Roxy sagged in relief. It was Jake. As she heard Dirk invite him in, she started to move back into the sitting room. She froze in the doorway, however, just in time to see the surprised look on Dirk’s face as Jake, his back to Roxy, stepped right up to the Prince and pressed a quick kiss to his lips.

“Uh,” Dirk said as they parted. Roxy shrank back into the bathroom, pressing her back against the wall. _Holy shit. Fuck fuck fuck! Hell. Yes!_ She took a moment to scrunch her face up and jiggle up and down with silent glee.

“Now, Strider,” Jake was saying nervously in the next room, “I hope I haven’t been too presumptuous—”

He cut off suddenly and Roxy couldn’t help but peek around the doorway to see what had happened. Dirk had grabbed Jake by the neck and pulled him in for another kiss, this one significantly less chaste than the first. His other hand came up behind Jake’s back to flip Roxy off.

She wolf-whistled. Jake jumped, managing to mash his and Dirk’s faces together painfully, so they stepped back from each other, each with a hand to his face and a grimace.

Jake turned to see Roxy, still holding her dinner dishes, leering happily. His hand dropped from his face to his heart, relief visible on his face. “Christ on a fucking cracker,” he muttered.

Roxy made a show of dramatically examining the crumbs on her plate. “Is _that_ what this was? You Skaians eat weird stuff.” 

Dirk chuckled, but Jake turned a scowl to him. “You cad! You could have told me she was here.”

“I dunno, man,” Dirk said, checking his hand for blood. Satisfied he had not gotten a bloody nose from the encounter, he grinned at Jake and continued, “You kinda didn’t give me a chance to say much at first before jumping my admittedly flamin’ hot bones.”

Roxy set her plates back on the table and grinned as she watched Jake fight a smile. “And your excuse for not saying something between me jumping your admittedly flaming hot bones, and you jumping mine…?”

“Jakey!” Roxy interjected, delighted. “You are _so bad_ at humble bragging. That’s the second time you’ve called yourself hot by comparing yourself to Di-Stri’s admittedly flaming hot bones. Though the first time, I believe it was to his choice ass.”

Jake sputtered. Dirk smirked. Roxy leered. All was well.

“So, Rox,” Dirk said after a minute, his eyes on Jake's increasingly red face. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Roxy’s grin widened and she dumped herself onto the couch. “Nope. Don’t mind me.”

Dirk rolled his eyes. “I am minding. Look at me mind. Are you minding?” he asked Jake.

Jake raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said in a dismissive tone that got surprised looks from both Low Aspects, “now that I _know_ I’m starring in a performance….”

He took Dirk by the waist and dipped him into a dramatic kiss. Dirk was less smooth and flailed a bit while Roxy cackled and hooted from the couch, clapping her hands.

Dirk steadied himself and shove at Jake’s shoulder to get the Noble to put him back on his feet, then stepped away, cheeks red. “Okay,” he breathed, smoothing out his tunic, “that sure… is a thing.”

Roxy laughed as she got up from the couch. “Turnabout is fair fuckin’ play, Dirk,” she said, flipping him off to remind him that he had done more or less the same thing to Jake a minute ago. “Now you’re even, and I’m going to bed.” She clapped them each on a shoulder as she passed them to get to the door. “Thank you for the entertainment, gentlemen, and remember.” She paused to look them each sternly in the eye. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

She closed the door, then turned around and leaned against it, letting the back of her head rest on the wooden barrier as she closed her eyes for a moment and let the wave of loneliness and jealousy wash over her. She breathed out, and let it go.

When she opened her eyes, she was face to face with a viciously smiling Jack Noir.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To the tune of "Spiderman":   
> Striderbros, Striderbros.  
> I live for   
> some Striderbros.
> 
> Comments? Thoughts? <3


	10. Descend

Jack was standing close enough to Roxy that she could smell his breath when he let out a slow, breathy laugh. She cringed and turned her face to the side, mind racing. She had barely enough time to tell herself, _Think of a lie!_ before Jack slammed a fist into her stomach. Unprepared for the blow, she doubled over, winded.

“What’s the matter, Rogue of _Breath_?” Jack sneered. “Surely you can just snatch back some air into your lungs.”

And he was right, of course, because if Roxy were actually a Rogue of Breath, he would never have been able to wind her like this. It was the one thing a Rogue of Breath could do reliably: snatch air from anywhere. Even underwater, a Rogue of Breath never failed to breathe.

She wheezed, trying to calm her heaving lungs, just in time for Jack to land a second punch into her stomach.

Roxy was better prepared this time, though, and tightened up her muscles as his fist landed, forcing air out of her lungs at the moment of impact to reduce its effect. She shoved at him, but Jack was an experienced fighter and twisted his shoulders so that the force of her push dissipated without moving him back.

“It’s too late, Lalonde,” Jack said, twisting her around so that her face was pressed into the wall and her arms were locked behind her back. He was standing close, using the weight of his body to keep her still as she struggled. Unfortunately, his hammerlock on her arm was solid, and her writhing just made her shoulder ache faster.

“I can’t wait to tell Her Majesty about you,” Jack sneered. “She’s going to take a lot of pleasure in torturing the truth out of you.”

Roxy, from her vantage point of having her head fucking smashed against the wall, was the first to see the red streak flashing toward them. The streak solidified into Dave, who came out of his impossibly fast dash with a hard kick to Jack’s side, sending him flying backwards. As Jack recovered himself, Dave grabbed Roxy’s arm.

“No!” Jack yelled, and then the world grew hazy and Roxy felt like she was being compacted, crushed from every angle into a hyperdense scrap of flesh and then _pop_ it was over and Dave was still holding her arm to steady her as she staggered.

“Don’t throw up!” Dave said urgently.

“Oh my god, Dave,” she gasped, “I really need to.”

He shoved her to a sitting position and bent her forward so that her head was between her knees, and said, “Concentrate on deep breaths.” She did, and after a moment, the wave of nausea passed.

“What the fuck just happened?” she demanded.

“Time travel,” Dave said, hauling her to her feet. He took hold of her hand and tugged her into a sprint down the hallway.

“Time travel?” she repeated, and tried to remember what she had learned from Rose’s book about Knights of Time. She stopped running and he reluctantly stopped, too, looking back at her impatiently. “How long?”

“Five minutes,” he said, glancing around nervously. “I took us five minutes back.”

“Then we have to warn me. Her. Me? Whatever! We have time to go and tell me not to leave through the front door!”

“No!” Dave hissed, tightening his grip on her hand as she tried to start back toward Dirk’s room. “Absolutely not.”

“Why? Jack can’t know!”

“He already knows, Roxy! It’s too late. If you go back and warn yourself, you’ll doom us all. There will be at least one dead Dave and dead Roxy out of the deal, and you won’t have done anything but make it less likely that Jane will ever trust us again.”

“But—”

“No buts! Trust me on this,” Dave said, and she could hear a hint of pleading in his voice. “Time travel is not something to fuck around with, and you don’t know anything about it. Going back there right now would _kill us both._ And maybe Dirk, too. Jack already knows. We cannot change that, not anymore.”

Roxy bit her lip, then nodded. “Okay. Okay, fine. So what do we do?”

“Get to Rose,” he said, and they were running again. As they approached what Roxy knew to be an exit to the building, they slowed, trying to look casual and stay out of sight.

Once outside, Dave held up a hand and stopped Roxy. He nodded to the little party in front of them, and Roxy’s stomach churned again as she saw Rose talking to… Dave.

She glanced between the two Daves, one so close their shoulders touched, the other a distant figure.

“She’s telling me about a vision she just had,” her Dave whispered. “About Jack. She’s about to send me on my way.”

And then the other Dave was running straight at them. The red blur slowed just long enough to reach out and fist bump Roxy’s Dave, and then was on his way, dashing madly through the halls to arrive just in time to kick Jack away from Roxy.

Dave and Roxy jogged toward Rose. There were a few other Light Guards, a Bard of Space and Thief of Hope who had accompanied her along with Dave to Jane’s palace tonight. Jade was also there, looking worried.

Everyone blinked a little in surprise as Dave and Roxy approached, and Roxy had half a minute to speculate on how strange it must have been from their perspective, to have seen Dave leave just thirty seconds ago and now here he was, out of breath from sprinting, Roxy in tow.

Rose tapped a finger to her lips thoughtfully. “We have to control the damage from this as much as possible,” she mused. “Did Jack see you, Dave?”

“Jack didn’t just see me, I fucking kicked him into next week,” Dave said.

“Well, shit.” Rose sighed. “Dave, take Roxy to Can Town. Jade, I’ll need you to help me with Jane, perhaps we can get to her before Jack does. Philip, Ellie, stay here and intercept any Midnight Crew members who try to follow Dave and Roxy, tell them you saw Roxy fleeing by herself in the direction of the shuttle station. If they ask about Dave, you think he’s with me.”

 

“How did he figure it out?” Roxy asked for what must have been the thirtieth time.

Dave shook his head, idly rolling a can of beans around as he watched the door for signs of anyone’s entry. It was late—it had already been late when Roxy and Dave had fled to the Palace of Light. They had taken the calculated risk of using her Void powers to disguise themselves as they had left the Empress’s palace behind, and had gone through the extra trouble of using some Perfectly Generic Objects to help cover their tracks, giving them to everyone they saw and backtracking around away from the Light District for a while with them to confuse the scent, then abandoning all Void related tricks for their actual approach to Rose’s home.

It probably meant that Jack had even more evidence of her Low Aspect status, now, but it had also been the only means of escape available to them in a pinch. Keeping Roxy alive had taken priority over masking her affinity to Void.

Roxy was exhausted, slumped against the wall of Can Town with Marcus curled in her lap, asleep. Dave looked tired, too, and she kept hearing his stomach rumble. He didn’t seem to notice, stalwart in his watch for signs of trouble.

“What were you and Rose doing at the Empress’s palace today?” Roxy asked, desperate to break the silence.

“Just a routine evening visit,” Dave answered. “There’s this old Seer of Time who lives there and Rose goes to visit him a few times a month, since he can’t move around enough to make it to the Palace of Light anymore.”

“Oh,” Roxy said. She fell silent again for a while, listening to the metallic rumble of the can as Dave rolled it back and forth. Finally, she asked, “Is time travel always like that?” 

Dave glanced over, then looked down at the can of beans. “Like what?” he asked, pushing the can of beans forward, then snatching it back just before it was out of reach.

She raised an eyebrow. “Confusing. Awful. Like getting buried by a pile of boulders. Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t barf all over everything.”

“Oh,” he said. He was quiet for a minute, his hands still on the can. Then he took off his dark-tinted glasses and rubbed at his face wearily. Roxy watched silently, curious. She had never seen Dave without the glasses covering most of his face; he wore them like some women wore makeup—constantly, as a mask, or maybe a buffer between self and world. When he looked over at her, her heart skipped a beat as she met his eyes directly for the first time ever. They were bright red, but also bloodshot and puffy, as if he’d been crying (he hadn’t). “I think that it’s different for me and other Time Aspects. I mean, it still sucks, but I’ve never felt sick from it before.”

“And?” Roxy prompted.

“And… taking someone with me, like I did with you, it… it takes a lot out of me. And I hate it anyway, it’s….” He trailed off, frowning at the can that he now was slowly tipping from side to side with two fingers. “Time travel is… it’s like living on the edge of a sword. One wrong move, one misstep, and the dead bodies start piling up. I’ve seen it enough times that I’d rather just leave the whole thing behind.”

“Can’t you?”

He looked up, eyebrow quirked. “I can’t leave Rose,” he said. “She’s everything.”

“What about John?” Roxy asked before she could stop herself.

Dave stiffened. “What about him?” he asked, tired eyes narrowing.

Roxy dropped her gaze to Marcus, shifting the sleeping boy gently so she could stretch her shoulder a bit. “I’ve seen how you look at him,” she said. “I get it. He’s sweet, and strong, and even kind of smart sometimes.”

Dave tilted his head. “Oh yeah? Looks like I’m not the only one with Egbert fever.”

Roxy laughed quietly. “No. I like John, but I’m not here to find a boyfriend, or a girlfriend for that matter. And I don’t think I could ever love a N—” she cut herself off, wincing in Dave’s direction.

“A Noble?” he filled in for her. She said nothing, looking away in her embarrassment at her prejudice laid bare. “You love Rose, don’t you?”

“That’s different,” Roxy whispered. “She’s like a sister.”

“It’s easier to think you can love the Seer of Light as your sister, than an Heir of Breath as your boyfriend?”

“I—no, it’s just….” She sighed. “I don’t know. Besides, I couldn’t go after John knowing how you feel about him.”

Dave scoffed bitterly. “Dude’s as straight as they come, Rox,” he said, a little too loud to pull off the nonchalance he was aiming for. “He’s never so much as sneezed in my direction in more than a friendly manner.”

Roxy thought of John’s hand on her shoulder earlier that day, when he had stepped between her and Jack. She said nothing.

A moment passed in silence, and then they both stiffened with sudden alertness as they heard the outside door open. Dave was on his feet in an instant, sword drawn but lowered. Roxy gently moved Marcus to the floor and stood, weaponless but ready to defend herself and the children if it came to it. Dirk had been tireless in his insistence that she learn hand-to-hand combat, and now more than ever, she was grateful for his sometimes unyielding persistence. 

The second door, the one that was a false wall on the inside of the stairwell cupboard, cracked open.

“It’s Jade,” Jade whispered. “Don’t kill me.”

She opened the door the rest of the way as Dave was sheathing his sword again. Roxy dropped her fists, and in a flash, Jade was upon her, arms thrown around her shoulders in a relieved embrace. “Thank god you made it back here okay,” Jade said quietly, and Roxy gave her a quick, reassuring squeeze before Jade let her go and threw her arms around Dave next.

“We’re okay, Jade,” he assured her, patting her back. Nearby, Marcus stirred from the noise, but none of the adults wanted him to waken, so Dave put a finger to his lips before gently lifting the boy and carrying him back into the depths of Can Town where the others slept.

Roxy turned to Jade. “How did it go with Jane?”

Jade shrugged. “Not great, but not awful. It helps that Jane is so devoted to Rose, but it was hard to explain why Dave would attack Jack to save you.”

“How _did_ you explain that?” Roxy asked as Dave reappeared.

Rubbing a weary hand across her face, Jade sat down, back to the wall. Roxy and Dave joined her. “Rose told the truth. Well, some of it. She said she had a vision of Jack attacking you and sent Dave to stop him. She claimed she didn’t know why Jack had attacked you, but that she was certain your survival was crucial to the unfolding peaceful visit by Dirk.”

Roxy winced. “How is Dirk?”

“Fine. He was summoned once Jack accused you of being a Rogue of Void. It rang too many bells with Jane and she finally started to get suspicious that Roxy Lalonde, Rogue of Breath, was pretty close to what she had heard about Roxy the Shadow, Rogue of Void. What were we thinking, using your real name?” Jade shook her head. “At least Jake had apparently never used ‘Lalonde’ when talking about you to Jane, so Dirk had enough deniability.”

“So Jane doesn’t suspect Dirk knows anything?” Roxy asked.

Jade bit her lip. “It’s hard to say with Jane,” she said. “The whole thing is very suspicious, and Jane is… well, she doesn’t let things go until she finds out the truth. So we’re not out of the woods yet.”

“And Rose?” Dave inquired.

“Safe,” Jade replied with a nod. “She sent me ahead but Ellie and Philip are with her. They should be getting back within the hour, and they’re bringing some Midnight Crew with them as a sign of good faith that Rose is invested in bringing Roxy in now that she knows why Jack attacked. You should be there to meet them, I think. We said we didn’t know where you had taken Roxy. It’d be best if you pretend she gave you the slip once you were clear of the guards and you came back here to wait for Rose.”

Dave nodded, then reached over and squeezed Roxy’s shoulder.

“We won’t let them get you,” he promised, before standing up and ducking through the wall/door.

 

Jade and Roxy were asleep in the depths of Can Town when Dave returned with Rose and John. Roxy woke first, gently shaking Jade awake, and they crept away from the still-sleeping children to converse in hushed voices.

“Well?” Jade asked. “How did it go?”

“Could have been worse,” Rose sighed.

“What time is it?” Roxy asked, stifling a yawn.

“Not quite four in the morning,” Dave answered promptly. Roxy guessed she and Jade had gotten two, maybe three hours of sleep. Which was two or three more hours than Rose and Dave.

“What’s our next move?” John asked.

“Wait, back up,” Roxy said, holding up a hand, which she then turned into a point at John’s chest. “What are you doing here?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Jane was on to me, duh,” he said, as if this should be obvious. When he apparently wasn’t going to say more, Roxy raised her eyebrows and rolled her hand in a ‘go on’ gesture. He rolled his eyes. “Once it was clear you weren’t actually a Breath Aspect, someone started thinking about all those times you had seemingly manipulated Breath anyway. I saw the writing on the wall and slipped away before they could start asking questions.”

Rose made a little _tsk_ sound of annoyance. “There’s no way Jane believes I didn’t know at this point,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “Damn Jack and his crew. I wish I knew how he made us.”

“Can’t you just order Jane to let it go?” Roxy asked. “You’re the High Priestess. She’ll listen to you.”

“Perhaps,” Rose said, “but it wouldn’t do us much good. We need Jane to trust us, to be ready to step in and keep the peace in the wake of Betty’s death.”

“Maybe we should have thought about that before turning all of her closest friends and confidantes into conspirators in her mother's murder,” Roxy snarked, regretting it as soon as she said it. Nobody got mad, though. Instead, she watched as everyone dropped their gaze uncomfortably away from one another. A harsh truth that everyone apparently had thought about (except, perhaps, the absent Jake), but nobody wanted to talk about.

“Don’t hold back,” Dave muttered after a minute.

“Sorry,” Roxy sighed. “So what do we do now? Jane doesn’t trust us, John and I are fugitives, Dirk is undoubtedly going to face a lot of scrutiny. What’s next?”

“You can’t stay here,” Rose said firmly. “As much as I wish you could. But they already suspect me and Dave enough. If you were to be found hiding here, I could be accused of high treason, and our plan would be as good as dead.”

Jade fidgeted. “I have an idea,” she said. “But I don’t think anyone’s going to like it.”

 

An hour later, Roxy and John were hurrying with Jade through the city in the crepuscular haze of the early morning. The sun was not above the horizon yet, but it wouldn’t be long. They had changed out of their ball clothing and now Jade wore an unremarkable black skirt and green shirt, and John and Roxy each wore a simple gray tunic over brown leggings and sturdy brown boots. The uniform of the Signless.

“This way,” Jade whispered urgently, and they followed her down an alley and through a dark doorway. Inside was a long, narrow hallway, with stairs going up to the next floor immediately to their left. Along the hall were several doors that apparently led into the buildings on either side of this hallway, but Jade led them past every single one, until at the end of the hallway they came across a gated stairwell that led down into a basement.

“It’s locked,” Jade said, annoyed. “Warded by a Rogue of Space against my abilities, too.”

“What?” Roxy said, confused. “How does that work?”

“Rogues of Space can leave what amounts to Space traps behind,” Jade said, pursing her lips for a moment. “If I try to alter the Space of the lock, as I normally would to get past it, by shrinking or expanding the size of it, the trap just sucks up my attempt and redistributes it elsewhere. A good Rogue of Space can make it like an alarm, too; the trap will steal away my Space manipulation and return it to the original spellcaster, who then knows that another Space Aspect was trying to mess with the lock.”

“Wow,” Roxy said. “That’s a pretty ingenious use of Rogue powers. I wonder if I can do that with Void?”

“Intriguing as the question is,” John said, “I think we have a more important matter on hand? How are we going to get past the lock?”

“No problem,” Roxy said with a grin, and moved past Jade to hold the lock in her hand. In her mind’s eye, the shape of a key was forming. She needed it to no longer _not_ exist…. Its details were coming to her slowly, and she laboriously peeled back layer after layer of obscuring void, willing the key into existence. She opened her eyes just in time to see the key materialize out of the void and in her hand. “Let’s see if that did the trick.”

She fitted the key into the lock and twisted. The lock sprang loose.

“That is too fucking cool!” Jade whooped. “I didn’t know you could do that!”

“I… don’t do it often,” Roxy admitted, a bit surprised herself that it had worked. “The simpler and less specific the object, the easier it is for me to de-void it.”

John pulled the grate open and ushered his friends through, then reached a hand back through to reattach the lock to it so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious anyone had been through. “Let’s just hope Jack and his Crew don’t smell it and know we’ve been through here,” he said as they started down the stairs.

Jade led them through a winding mess of hallways, each narrower and darker than the last, until the hallways started to seem suspiciously like… cave passages.

“Are we…?”

“Yep! Welcome to the caverns of Skaia, in which mad science goes down on the daily. Also my place of employment,” Jade said, looking over her shoulder with a grin. She opened a wooden door fitted into a juncture of passageways, and when Roxy and John stepped through, they found themselves in a large, natural cavern.

Equipment like Roxy had never seen, huge and metal and thrumming with impossible energy, dominated the impressive view. Bottles of green slime and oddly mutated, dead creatures dotted the shelves. Before them, on the largest piece of equipment, was a set of what looked to be four glass windows, except instead of being transparent, they were black, opaque.

“What… what is this?”

“The ectobiology lab,” Jade answered. “The oldest and creepiest place you can imagine, and where we were all brought into being.”

“I don’t know what I pictured when I imagined ectobiology equipment,” Roxy breathed, running her hands over the closest husk of metal and glass, “but it wasn’t this. How is it possible? Does it… does it run on steam?”

“No,” Jade said, gesturing her over to where she was slipping behind a large, furnace-looking shell of metal. “We call it _electricity_ , and it’s generated by this.” She slid a piece of metal to the side, revealing a window into the contraption, and Roxy peered through it at a glowing green hunk of mineral.

“What is it?” Roxy asked.

“Uranium,” Jade replied. “One big chunk of it like this lasts for years and years, providing power for the entire lab network. It’s mined on Earth.”

“How… how is all of this possible?” Roxy couldn’t help but repeat her earlier question. “We haven’t even gotten steam engines to be efficient enough for small-scale usage! This… elec… electrocity—”

“Electricity,” Jade corrected.

“Yeah, that. If a rock can generate enough of it to run this entire lab for years… holy shit, Jade. This would revolutionize everything we know about energy!”

“Yes,” Jade agreed. “And yet, it hasn’t.”

“Why?” An old history lesson of Roxy’s came back to her, about the origins of ectobiology and how it had replaced natural means of reproduction over time. She gasped. “This must have been here for hundreds of years! How has the knowledge of it, the _science_ of it, not spread?”

Jade closed the little sliding door, once again concealing the hunk of green mineral. “Uranium is very rare,” she said. “The past several Life rulers have hidden its existence and potential since its discovery.”

“But they built all of this? How? Who invented ectobiology, who imagined up this… _thing_ —”

“We call them ‘machines,’” Jade supplied.

“Okay, m- machines. Someone, at some point hundreds of years ago, must have learned how to make uraniwhatsit into electriwhatsit, and then said, ‘you know what I can do with this? Take all the fun outta breedin’ children, and I’m gonna build these impossible machiniwhatevers out of _metal_ to do it.’” She shook her head in disbelief. “Why not use it to generate energy for… I don’t know, transportation, or sewage systems, or… or… food storage?”

“I don’t think that’s how it happened,” John said, speaking up for the first time. Jade nodded her agreement. “See, the story goes, these labs were _already here_ when people first started exploring the caverns on the three Floating Isles.”

“What? Then… where did they come from?”

Jade shrugged. “How is it possible for an island to float in the sky?” she asked. “Where did Class and Aspect abilities come from? Why can Rose see visions of the future, or you pop keys out of nothing to open locked doors?” She gestured around her. “The existence of these labs makes about as much sense to me as any of those things.”

“But this is _science_!” Roxy insisted. “Aspect stuff, floating islands… that’s mystical, the stuff of fairytales, in that it cannot be replicated. This is… this is something we could reproduce. We could take these things apart, see how they work, and make amazing things!”

“Not likely,” Jade scoffed.

“Why not?” Roxy demanded, getting riled up. Why couldn’t they _see_? This electricity stuff, these metal machines… the world would never be the same!

John patted Roxy’s arm, trying to calm her down a bit. “One guess, and I’ll give you a hint. The answer starts with B and ends with -etty Crocker.”

“Ectobiology precedes Betty,” Roxy said, successfully schooling her volume and tone back to agreeable conversational levels. “This has been here longer than Betty has been Empress.”

“True,” Jade agreed. “We didn’t have enough understanding of electricity and machinery until recently to even start to understand how these work. Now that we do…. Well, Betty is the one who figured out how to rewrite genetic code with ectobiology, and she’s not about to let that control go if she can help it.”

“I don’t understand. What is genetic code? What do you mean, rewrite it?”

Jade sighed. “Roxy, can we play twenty questions about this later? We’ve barely slept or eaten, and I have to be at work in two hours. Let’s get you and John hidden away, and I’ll explain everything after I’m done working today.”

 

Roxy and John were tucked away down a forgotten tunnel, plenty of candles and matches pilfered by Jade from the lab’s storeroom so that they wouldn’t have to just sit in the dark. Jade had also brought them sleeping mats and blankets, using her Witch of Space powers to shrink them down to be carried in a backpack, then enlarging them again once they had found a safe little place to nest. Last, she had left them with hearty travel food that would last for a day or two. Besides the candles, their goods and gear had come from Rose and the Palace of Light.

After Jade had promised to return as soon as she could, she disappeared back in the direction of the lab.

Roxy hated being in the cavern. The dark was fine, but being _underground_ was so much worse than all of her other little hiding spots. She had never felt so distant from the void, or from her loved ones. Rose, a distant figure impossible to reach now. Jane, hunting her for execution. Dirk, having to pretend not to even know her. And now,to top it all off, she was stuck in a dark, tight, voidless place that felt too much like the cupboards, closets, and crawlspaces of her childhood.

She settled her sleeping mat next to John’s, turned sad and tired eyes on him. “I don’t…,” she tried, but couldn’t figure out what to say. The low ceiling of the cave seemed to press down on her, reminding her of the span of dirt and rock that separated her in either direction from the open sky.

“Roxy?” John said hesitantly, sitting on his own mat. He had taken off his glasses in preparation for sleep. “Are you okay?”

She shrugged. “Can I lay next to you?” she asked.

“I… of course you can,” he said, and she heard the pity in his voice, and hated that she must have looked so pathetic. She crumpled onto the sleeping mat and nestled in close to John, using his shoulder as a pillow. He reached over with his other hand and brushed some hair out of her face, then smiled when she looked up at him. “It’ll all work out,” he said quietly.

She didn’t know what to make of John, or his reaction to her request to cuddle up. It felt friendly more than romantic, but either way, Roxy felt an ache deep in her chest as she closed her eyes and let him pull a blanket up around them. He cocooned them in, and she was warm, and she thought guiltily of Dave and Dirk and Rose and Jane and was too tired to sort out all of those feelings, so she focused on how good it felt to fall asleep in someone’s arms instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the first time in a while on this fic I'm a little bit ahead in writing, wow! We're in the home stretch now, probably between 3-4 more chapters on this growing beast.
> 
> What is happening with John and Roxy? With Dave and John?! How did this happen, how?! lol jk if we know anything about Roxy's romantic pursuits, it's that they are filled with strife, confusion, and unsatisfactory proceedings. Also with no Karkat (T-T Davekat is my jam), it just kinda felt right to open the old Dave-likes-John-but-John-is-not-a-homosexual! can of worms. Thoughts? DO YOU HATE IT? DO YOU SHIP IT? Inquiring minds wish to know. 
> 
> P.S. next chapter will provide more food for thought re: Roxy and matters of the heart (Dirk pun not, surprisingly, intended).
> 
> Leave a comment! <3


	11. Knowledge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This... did not get the proofread it deserves. Sorry if there's a higher than usual rate of typos/rough spots. I'll probably clean it up a little later?

Jade did not have time to explain more that night. She came into the tunnel/cave in a rush, making sure they had everything they needed, then gave them the news.

“I can’t stay,” she said, and by her tone, John and Roxy both knew something was wrong. They sat to attention, nervous energy crackling between them. “It’s… Betty. She’s coming back after she got word of what happened yesterday night. Rose needs me to be with Jane to try to help mitigate the fallout.”

Roxy shivered at the thought of the Empress returning finally, and was all sorts of mad that she didn’t get to be there to see the woman herself.

“Jade,” she said urgently, grabbing the Witch’s arm even as Jade stood to leave again. “Don’t let Dirk kill her. Not yet. Not without me.”

Jade gave her a helpless look before shaking her head as she stood up. “I’ll do what I can, Roxy.”

 

Two more full days passed and they saw Jade only briefly on the morning of the second day. She apologized for being absent but explained quickly that there were several children they had to smuggle out of the lab sooner than anticipated thanks to Betty’s earlier-than-planned return. She had been working with Earth networks to get the children, a Rage and a Mind Aspect, safely hidden from the Empress. These were children like Roxy, who had no Class, and whom Betty would have killed for fear of them becoming a Lord or Muse later in life.

“There were six others from the other labs,” Jade said. “But Betty’s presence at the Prospitian lab made it impossible to save the two there. The Derse labs got their four safely to Earth yesterday. Three Blood and a Hope.”

And then she handed them a deck of cards and was gone again. Skaian playing cards were different than Earth cards, so John had to teach her about the different suits and games. She caught on quickly enough, and was soon reliably beating John at the games he had taught her. John was good at taking decisive action in a pinch, and won more than a few games by surprising her with blunt force offense when she had expected crafty defense. But Roxy learned quickly from her mistakes, and cunning soon trumped brawn.

Well into their third night in the caves, Roxy restlessly got up from where she had curled up next to John hours ago. He was asleep, but she had been fighting back a rising panic as anxious thoughts about never getting out of the caves intruded on her rest. She felt antsy, like if she didn’t move around a bit, she would claw her own skin off.

So she lit a candle and followed the tunnels and hallways back toward the big lab that Jade had first brought them to. She carefully checked to make sure it was empty, but this late in the night (or early in the morning?), no one was around. The only staff members who would be here at this time were the caregivers attending to the batch of ectobabies who were slated to be sent out for adoption within the next few days.

She sat down in one of the many empty chairs, scooting so that she was looking up at the biggest machine with it four glass screens.

Without really knowing what she was doing, she pushed some buttons on the console. Nothing happened. She wondered if, like steam engines, the uranium needed to be heated up first before the electricity worked? Bored, she pushed more buttons. The sixth button resulted in sudden light beaming at her from the top left screen.

She jumped back, staring around the lab in fear. Would this alert someone to her presence? Did other people know when one of these machine thingies was activated?

After a few minutes of silent waiting, in which absolutely nothing happened, Roxy turned back to the screen.

She hesitantly pushed the same button that had resulted in it turning on, and it turned off. Okay. A power button. Got it. She turned it back on, then pushed the one next to it. A second screen powered on. Ah. Separate power buttons for each screen, apparently. Soon enough, she had all four screens switched on.

Okay so, she knew she shouldn’t sit here and play with this big mystery machine, right. Like, she _knew_. Don’t tell her again, bro, she’s heard it all before. And yet.

After some trial and error she discovered a rolling ball-like device that let her navigate on the screen. It took another few minutes to figure out how to select and interact with icons and symbols. Depress the ball to select. Depress again to transform the little icon into a new full screen, different from the one before. Okay, don’t panic, this was probably normal. Surely the little icons couldn’t be morphed into new screens if there wasn’t a way to undo that, right? She looked closely at the new screen and found a little red || in the top corner, the same symbol used in scribe notation for something to be struck from a record.

She navigated the little… ugh, what even was that? An arrow? Sure. She navigated the arrow that she controlled with her rolly-ball to the || button, then depressed the ball. The screen changed back to the previous one. She tried selecting the same icon again, and got the same new screen.

“Alright, now we’re getting somewhere,” she said, engrossed. She looked at the new information on the screen, satisfied that she understood at least enough to get back to the original screen. The image she had opened was a list of numbered items, called “Trials.” She selected the first one.

On the top left screen, an image of a mutant humanoid creature, clearly not alive, appeared, rotating slowly. Below, the bottom left screen showed a string of incomprehensible letters (the same four letters, A, C, T, and G, repeating in infinite combination to Roxy’s eyes). The top right screen was blank, but the bottom right screen had a scientist’s notes.

> _Adjustment to sequence D14B88 resulted in stillbirth. Physically obvious mutations notable without internal examination. Unlike change to sequence D14B87, introduction of the Falstaff Sequence to D14B88 proves fatal._

Roxy read more, but did not have enough context to really understand the notations. She used the || icon to close the first trial screen, and opened the next.

This time the image was a human baby, unmutated, alive. Below it, the sequences of letters again. To the side, notations.

> _Adjustment to sequence D14B89 resulted in live birth. Specimen is healthy and Mage D. Trenor confirms signs of Low Aspect developing, likely Mind or Blood. Falstaff Sequence successfully embedded, but Aspect development suggests continued failure._

Eighteen more of these, and Roxy’s best guess was that the Falstaff Sequence was one of these ‘genetic codes’ that Jade had talked about, intended to prevent children from developing an Aspect affinity. Of Class, there was no mention.

Roxy closed the Falstaff file and selected a different icon. This one took her to a screen on which there were alphanumeric codes (similar to the ones used in the Falstaff notes, starting at A00A01) next to four-letter sequences of those same four letters, A, C, T, and G. She used the rolly-ball thing to scroll through, but gave up partway through because there were no notes or indications of what she was looking at.

Another icon, another screen of letters and numbers.

Eventually she figured out how to put different images on different screens, and yeah, _now_ she was getting somewhere, now she had the means to do some comparison….

Her eyes grew tired as hours of scanning the displays passed, but she didn’t noticed, engrossed as she was in the puzzle of the codes. She reopened some of the Falstaff documents to try to compare what she was figuring out against the notes. And… maybe… yeah it was starting to make sense? Like she still didn’t have a clue what exactly she was looking at, but she had an okay guess now. These letter combinations stood in for some kind of essential elements of the human body, and the different combinations resulted in different traits. Like, maybe these three lines made up her ears, or determined her skin color. Work with her, okay, she was teaching herself on the fly in the middle of the night in a creepy cave laboratory full of mutants in slime.

She dozed off, and lines of ACTG combinations danced on the back of her eyelids.

 

Roxy awoke with a start at the sound of heeled footsteps in the cavern echoing loudly. She scrambled to her feet, terror in her throat but no scream forthcoming, trying to identify who was there.

“Just as I suspected,” said a voice to her right, and she jumped back, turning to stare at Jane Crocker. She wore a cream colored dress with a green Life flare on its breast today, fairly plain and unassuming, except that symbol of her Aspect that only two people could wear made it impossible to forget that she was a hair’s breadth away from ruling the entire damn Empire.

“Jane,” Roxy whispered, stepping back, eyes darting around as she looked for an escape. _Fuck._ What time was it? “How did you find me?”

Jane tilted her head, watching Roxy closely. “I’m not here to hurt you, Roxy,” she said instead of answering, stepping toward her. “You needn’t act like a cornered beast.”

Roxy raised an eyebrow, continuing to back away as Jane continued to advance, until she felt the back of her legs brush up against the cold console of the machine she had fallen asleep in front of. Jane stopped a few feet back. “Gotta be honest with you, Janey dear, I’m feelin’ a bit too much like a cornered beast not to act like one.”

“Did you know,” Jane said, changing the subject abruptly, her eyes moving away from Roxy and onto the screens of unintelligible genetic code, “that Light is the Aspect not just of fortune, but also of knowledge?”

“Um. Yes?” Roxy hazarded, unsure where this was going. Shit, should she make a void bubble and try to get away?

Jane nodded. “Rose invited me to the Palace of Light yesterday,” she continued, and she sounded almost like a normal person telling a friend a story. “I met a young priest there, not even twenty years old. A Thief of Light.”

“Oh?” Roxy said after a pause. She had no fucking clue what to do. Keep Jane talking, she supposed.

“Turns out, this Thief of Light and Rose have been working together for some time now to piece together a history of ectobiology and human reproduction. It didn’t take me long to deduce why a Thief of Light would be such an ideal research partner in this endeavor.”

Roxy tilted her head, some of her fear subsiding as her interest in Jane’s story grew. “Why is that?”

“Because it is forbidden knowledge,” Jane answered simply. “Knowledge that has been locked away and hidden from others by my mother.”

“Did Rose tell you something about ectobiology you didn’t know?” Roxy asked.

Jane made this helpless little shrug that broke Roxy’s heart, a one-shouldered thing accompanied by a sideways head tilt and a scornful, sad twist of her mouth. But instead of answering Roxy’s question, she asked one of her own. “Why did you come to Skaia?”

Roxy weighed her options. The truth was dangerous. A lie was dangerous. What was Jane looking for? She took a breath, opened her mouth—

“The truth, please,” Jane interjected, sounding weary and a bit sharp. “I’ve had it up to the eyeballs with all the lies and pussyfooting around that everyone has been doing.”

Roxy couldn’t help it. She let out one confused, strangled giggle. “Pussyfooting,” she repeated. And Jane’s mouth quirked so, so briefly into a smile, and the sight of it flooded Roxy from chest to stomach to a little further south with relief and… and….

“I want to kill the Empress,” she heard herself say.

Jane didn’t look surprised, just nodded like this was what she had been expecting. Had Roxy just passed a test? “Why?”

Well, the truth hadn’t killed her yet, despite her best efforts to employ it at the worst times, so. What the hell. “When Dirk and I were children, we were smuggled away from the ectolabs and hidden away on Earth without families, along with a third girl, a Space Aspect named Callie.” Jane’s eyes narrowed. Roxy continued. “We were the only three who made it that year, or so the adults who cared for us told us. Babies without a Class. We were hunted for years by your mother and her drones.”

“Is that so,” Jane said flatly, and oh boy, was Roxy in deep shit. Nothing to do but press on.

“It is so. Not long after Dirk learned he was a Prince, Callie found out she was a Muse.” Jane’s eyebrows twitched up. This was not the twist she had expected. “And then they found us, and they killed her. Just like that. A Prince of Hope crushed the damn life out of her like you’d crush a fuckin’ cockroach.”

_Her head struck the pavement and bounced limply, no neck muscles straining to protect her skull from the blow._

“Dirk and I got away,” she continued shakily after a few seconds of silence, “because my void power protected us.”

Jane stared up at the lines of code on the four screens behind Roxy. “Rose told me a great deal I didn’t know,” she said, and it took Roxy a moment to realize that the Maid had circled back to her question from earlier in the conversation. “Humans used to reproduce through sex, just like other animals. This I knew, of course. Did you know that humans born through sexual reproduction did not have Aspect affinities, nor Classes?”

“I… didn’t, no.”

Idly, Jane played with a golden ring on her finger. “Me neither. Only children born of ectobiology receive such gifts.”

“Gifts,” Roxy repeated derisively. “Sure.”

“You do not think them such?”

Roxy sat on the console, careful not to push any buttons with her butt. (Ha, buttons. Butt.) “I lived in the Rage Quarter for a while as a kid,” she said. “I belong to a Corrupted caste, though I’ve had it better than most thanks to Dirk’s friendship. No, as much as I love Void and the feeling of connection I have to it, if being born without Aspect or Class would have meant not being subjected to some of the shit I’ve seen, or a life worth living for your average Rage Aspect, then, sign me up.”

Jane wordlessly held a hand out before her and in it, she held a few tiny seeds. “I carry these around with me,” she said quietly, “to remind myself what it means to be Maid of Life.” Roxy watched curiously as Jane’s shoulders seemed to relax, the ever-present frown furrowing her eyebrows disappeared. She didn’t look happy, but for the first time, Roxy noticed that Jane’s normal state of being was tense, uptight, seized. As her whole body relaxed, the seeds sprouted, sending roots around Jane’s fingers as if they were soil, sending up stalks of green, leafing out, flowers budding.

Roxy gasped. Jane opened her eyes, and looked at the flowers. “You should see my personal garden,” she said drily. “It’s a mess.”

Roxy leaned forward, stroked a finger along the length of one of the flower stems, marveling at it. “This is incredible!” she exclaimed.

“No more so than you disappearing at will,” Jane said. “You _can_ do that, can’t you?”

“I can,” Roxy confirmed.

“Well.” Jane set the flowers on the console next to Roxy. “My point is, Aspect affinities… it’s not so bad.”

“For you.”

Jane winced. “Perhaps. But I’m not here to argue the finer points of who has the best abilities. I wanted to tell you about Rose.” Jane pulled up the chair Roxy had been dozing in, sat down. “It turns out, my mother figured out how to write infertility into humanity’s….”

“Genetic code?” Roxy guessed.

“That’s it. She employed endless teams of scientists who studied in these very ectobiology labs, and years and years of research resulted in ectobabies that cannot reproduce through sex. From there, she started chemically sterilizing the population, all the while increasing the yearly production of new children via ectobiology. Sustainable population reproduction. It was, in some ways, a genocide.” Silence for a moment. “The population of humanity fell from somewhere in the hundred millions to just about ten million, where it remains today.”

Roxy whistled, low and sad. “Why?”

“Control,” Jane said bitterly. “At least, that’s my best guess. Because after that, she couldn’t stop messing with the code. Of course the caste system predates her rule, but the fact that every single person now had an Aspect, well. It resulted in needing a firmer set of social rules for Betty’s tastes. Fewer Life and Light Aspects. More Blood and Mind. Sorting who could live where, instilling a hierarchy far more rigid than had existed previously by pitting the ill-fortuned against the even more ill-fortuned, making the Nobles believe themselves to be superior. At least, this is the tale Rose told me.”

“But you don’t believe it?” Roxy asked, deflating.

“I didn’t,” Jane said, too quietly. “Until Mother came back from Prospit earlier today.”

The silence stretch for a long time, long enough that Roxy wasn’t sure Jane would be continuing. But she did. “A new Life Aspect was born this year,” Jane said finally.

Roxy sucked in a sharp breath, remembering what Jake had told her about the last few Life Aspects and their untimely deaths. “Oh, Janes. Oh, shit.”

“Indeed. I found out by accident, too,” she said. “I went to find Mother on my own, but mind you, I’d been chewing over what Rose had told me for a good day by that point, and was… troubled. Not convinced, just kind of, uncertain? So I went to find Mother but not with any particular eagerness, and so I stopped outside when I heard her talking to Jack. She was telling him about this new Heir of Life, and I was just so… shocked, so _thrilled_ even, because I’m of parenting age, and I thought, maybe this Heir is my child.”

Roxy felt dread boiling up inside of her, imagining the many, many ways this could have gone wrong.

“It’s not even that I really want to raise kids, you know?” Jane said, and Roxy’s heart clenched at the sound of her voice, so clearly straining around a lump in her throat. “I had given it little thought. Life Aspects are so rare, and I am just barely of age and unmarried. But when I heard about this Heir, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad, to be his mother. I mean, it made more sense than Betty raising him, didn’t it? What with her being elbows deep in running a whole Empire. And even if she adopted him as my brother, I’d probably end up raising the kid anyway, for that very same reason.”

“But?” Roxy asked.

“But then I listened to what Mother was actually saying and, well. I’ve always known I’ve been a disappointment to her, being a Maid and all, but I never thought….” She stopped, and to Roxy’s horror, she leaned forward, burying her face in her hands, beginning to sob.

Without really thinking about it, Roxy slid off the console and knelt next to Jane’s chair, putting an arm around her shoulders, the other on the Inheritor’s knee. It was an awkward hug, but Jane slumped into it, letting a few more sobs escape before disciplining herself back into a calmer demeanor. Roxy pulled up another chair, now sitting right next to Jane, leaning forward intently to listen to the rest of the story.

“It turns out,” Jane said, her tone carefully controlled, the pace of her words slow and even, “that she doesn’t see much value to having a third Life Aspect around. And so she was debating with Jack whether to… to keep me or the Heir baby. The Heir is higher on the Class order, so he would be more of a threat. But I’m a Maid and not really worthy of the Crocker name, I guess. So which one does she keep and which does she…?”

This sat in the silence between them for a long moment.

Then Jane gave a mirthless, rueful laugh. “And she never even told me about the boy once I did present myself to her properly. Pretended like nothing was wrong, like her trip to Prospit had been quite ordinary. What was I to do? Tell her I knew? Eavesdropping wouldn’t have tipped the scales in my favor.” She shook her head. “Not that I even want them to be tipped in my favor. That poor baby has a right to grow up. Why should I survive and not him? Besides, she’s right that an Heir _is_ a much more suitable Inheritor than a Maid.”

“Oh, Janey,” Roxy sighed, reaching over and gripping Jane’s hand in her own. “There’s nothing inherently better about an Heir than a Maid. Look at Betty. She’s a Sylph, solidly in the mid to high Class range, and we all know that Sylphs are supposed to be almost holy in their demeanor. All of the Class lore says Sylphs are calm, even-keeled, loving, gentle. Does _any_ of that sound like your mom?”

Jane gave a watery laugh, eyebrows raising as she glanced away. “Fair enough.”

“My point is, it’s all kind of silly and arbitrary. Bards are fairly rare, and sit near the bottom of the Class range. Princes are quite rare, and sit near the top. Maids are super common and sit at the bottom. Knights are pretty common, and sit near the top. Where’s the logic in it? Yet it dictates so much about how we think about other people and governance.”

They sat together in weary silence again, Roxy still holding Jane’s hand companionably. The Rogue was almost dozing off again when Jane said, “What do I do?”

Roxy’s eyes fluttered open again, and she frowned sadly at the woman next to her, who looked so young and small right now. Frightened. Roxy’s heart ached in sympathy, and she wished she could steal away Jane’s pain as easily as she snatched void.

“Trust in your friends,” Roxy said instead, echoing Rose’s advice from the night of the ball. “Believe in yourself.”

Jane chuckled, wiping at her tears. “Eat my vegetables?” she guessed.

“Wear sensible shoes,” Roxy said with a grin. Then she sighed and said, “But really. We’re… we’re trying to make things better.”

“By killing my mother,” Jane said, but it wasn’t accusatory, just… flat. Resigned, maybe. “Who all is in on this? Rose and Dave, obviously. John, or he wouldn’t have run when Jack figured you out. Dirk, I presume. Jade? Of course, we’re in the ectolab. That’s how I found you. I guessed Jade had hidden you, and I was right. Rose did tell me to trust my instincts.” She snorted a derisive laugh and took her hand back from Roxy, turning away a little, and Roxy knew she was hiding fresh tears from the set of her shoulders. “I’m such an idiot,” she whispered, rubbing at her face again. “I can’t believe the whole lot of you were using me to get to Mother the whole time. How did I miss it?”

“Hey, whoa, hold up there, missy. I walked into this thing planning to use you or any other means to get to your mom, sure. But Rose, Dave, Jade, John. Jake. They love you; they have from the start. And… I know you can never feel this way about me, but Jane, I just….” She paused, unsure of how to continue. “I think of you as my friend,” she said finally, and she pushed down the feeling of uneasiness that the label ‘friend’ brought to her stomach. “I know I have no right, and not just because you’re slated to run the fuckin’ empire when Betty kicks the bucket, may it be soon. But also because I deceived you, and entered into this relationship under false pretenses. Murderous pretenses. I don’t expect you to forgive me, not really, but… I _am_ sorry for lying to you, and for using you to get to Betty.”

“I thought of you as my friend, too,” Jane whispered, still facing away. “Now I don’t know what to think. My mother wants to kill me, or that Life baby who should be my family. My friends are conspirators in a traitorous plot to kill my mother, the highest treason of the land that I help rule.” She shook her head, then rested it in one hand. “Nothing makes sense anymore.”

A noise deep in the caverns startled both women to their feet. Roxy was nervous again. “What time is it?” she asked.

Jane shrugged. “Probably around seven in the morning,” she murmured, voice low.

Roxy took a step back from her, quickly used the many || icons on the different screens to shut down the content she had been viewing, then powering the whole station down. Then she took another step back, facing Jane again.

Jane saw the question on her face and waved a hand dismissively. “I won’t tell anyone you’re here. I have no interest in seeing you executed, and Mother would have it no other way.” The Inheritor started for the exit, then turned and threw her arms around Roxy first. “I’m sorry, too,” she whispered. “Talk to you soon, I think.”

And then she was gone, and Roxy hurried back to where John still slept, unsure if Jane's parting words were a promise or a threat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jane/Roxy now, too?! Geez, pick your ships already, Nickel.
> 
> A dialogue heavy chapter for you to gear us up toward something a bit bigger next time...! I hope you're enjoying the world fleshing out a little as we wait with Roxy for gears to turn.
> 
> I am *almost* positive that the story will be done in 3 chapters now! Most of ch 12 is written and I have a plan for 13 and 14, which should get us to the end. But you never know, sometimes halfway through a chapter something comes up and I'm like oh, right, that. (My very formal, disciplined writing process.)
> 
> Comments??? <3


	12. Crescendo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is about 1000 words longer than the rest! Also, like last chapter, it really didn't get the kind of proofreading it should have, so I hope it isn't too riddled with errors! Another Dirk POV. Feel free to imagine that during all of this Roxy is slowly driving John up the wall in the cavern because she is getting more and more antsy and annoyed with being stuck underground.

Dirk Strider had never felt so alone in his life as he sat stiffly in the palace’s formal dining room. The table was absurdly long for just three people. To his far left, Betty Crocker herself sat at the head of the table. To his far right, Jane Crocker sat picking unhappily at her food. Jake had been sent with missives from Dirk, Jane, and Betty to Earth, on the Empress’s orders, to help Caterina with the first waves of children arriving from the ectobiology labs. Adoption day happened only twice a year, and this would be Caterina’s first such day in charge of the proceedings.

And Roxy was… well. Roxy had a habit of making a mess and then disappearing, didn’t she. He wasn’t too bitter—most days her penchant for troublemaking was one of the many reasons he loved her. But today he was sour about it because he was really, truly, immensely terrified, and he wanted his goddamn best friend.

At least Jane had covered for him. He knew she knew that he was lying about his relationship to Roxy, and after she had disappeared the previous morning, she had come back subdued, thoughtful, sad. He had offered her his arm to escort her to lunch yesterday, and she had said something along the lines of “Roxy says hi” and he just. Roxy. You know?

So yeah, Jane had to know. And now they were sitting here at breakfast five days after Roxy and John had disappeared, and he was trying not to freeze under Betty’s suspicious glare.

And fuck. He had hated the Empress before meeting her, but now? Now he hated her and was fucking petrified that at any minute she’d change her mind about him and have his head chopped off.

“Jane,” Betty said, snapping both her daughter and Dirk out of their reveries. “I have asked Jack to assign permanent guards from the Midnight Crew to escort you at all times.”

Jane’s eyes widened. “Mother?”

“For your safety, dear. Your last bodyguards turned out to be a _Low_ Aspect and some pathetic Breath Aspect who was aiding her. You still need guards, and your judgment on hiring them is clearly not to be trusted.”

“Guards, Mother? Or bodyguards?”

“Semantics, Jane.”

Dirk refrained from snorting his disagreement. The relationship between Jane and the Empress was notably strained, which he had not expected from the way Jane had talked about Betty prior to her return to Skaia. In private meetings, Jane had been the very picture of a devoted, doting daughter.

Now she looked at Betty and Dirk thought she looked a bit like a caged animal. Scared. Ferocious. Ready to spring to action at the first sign of danger.

 _Note to self,_ he thought, shoveling another bite of the warm grain breakfast dish into his mouth. _Stay on Jane’s good side._

“Prince Strider,” Betty said, turning her attention to Dirk. He swallowed the lump of cereal down quickly, turning to face her.

“Yes, Your Majesty?”

“Today, I would like you to accompany me for a tour of the Circle Gardens.”

“Mother,” Jane interjected indignantly. “Dirk and I have plans to—”

“Cancel them,” Betty said with finality.

Dirk cleared his throat. “Your Majesty,” he said carefully, his tone polite and docile, “Maid Crocker and I were supposed to see the High Priestess today.” Rose was, of course, the one person who could really pull rank on the Empress.

Betty set her fork down, leaning back in her chair and tapping one long, thin finger to her red lips thoughtfully. “I see,” she said slowly. “Always a thorn in my side, the priesthood.” Dirk and Jane shot each other shocked looks out of the corner of their eyes; such a statement was tantamount to blasphemy. “Well, you cannot make Her Holiness wait for me, I suppose. The Gardens can be tomorrow.”

It was painfully clear to Dirk that Betty Crocker did not like having to yield authority to Rose. He watched the Empress’s brooding with unease. How easily Betty had offed other threats to her authority in the past, and yet she had never made a move against the Light Priesthood in the eighty years of her rule. But she looked about as stable as a two-legged tripod to him, and he had the uneasy feeling that she was looking to break that streak sometime soon.

“Mother,” Jane said, demure respect manifest in her voice, “perhaps we can send word ahead to the Seer of Light and have members of the Light Guard meet us and relieve my guards their duty at the gates to the Light District. You know that the Midnight Crew is not welcome on holy ground.”

Betty smiled, but it was all teeth. “Of course, dear. How convenient.”

“You could always come with us,” Dirk said, and both Jane and Betty stared at him incredulously. “If you’re worried about Maid Crocker’s safety, I mean. How better to ensure her safe transference to the Light Guard’s care than to personally oversee it? And I’m sure Seer Rose would be happy to include you in today’s prayer service.”

After a long pause in which Dirk saw many, many iterations of his head leaving his body, Betty threw her head back and cackled, and the unnatural sound of her laughter threw shivers down his spine.

Suddenly his perception _shifted_ and instead of sensing the world through sight, sound, and the like, he was in that space where information came to him through vibrations and movements of souls. He was not a Seer of Heart; he could not look at a person’s soul and know details about their lives, personalities, and moral fiber. But to fracture Heart, as he could, he still had to be able to sense souls, and he had gotten the hang over the years of gleaning information from that sensation.

Jane’s soul vibrated close to the surface of her skin, and he recognized the dynamic vitality of Life thrumming through it. It was… huge. Maid of Life, made of life. Every Aspect felt a little different to his soul sense, and from Jane he had found the thrill of pure vivacity.

Betty’s soul hummed deep beneath her surface, hidden and tucked and folded away. There was some of the same feeling of Life, present, but it was so inward-facing that he had a hard time even identifying it.

He imagined what it would be like, to try to seize her soul and splinter it. He dared not; one wrong move and she would escape and he would undoubtedly learn what it felt like for his body, instead of his soul, to be split into parts for once.

As quickly as he had inverted his sensors he flipped them back. Betty’s laugh was just starting to die.

“You’re a clever one, Dirk Strider,” she said.

“I meant nothing more than to invite you to join us, Your Majesty,” he murmured humbly.

“And I mean nothing more than to say, no. I will not set foot in that snake’s lair. Seer Rose sees much, but she won’t be seeing my face at a prayer service any time soon. You kids have fun wasting your day praying to your indifferent gods.”

 

“So,” Rose said as she, Jane, Dave, and Dirk settled on couches and plush chairs around her personal coffee table, where the eponymous beverage was brewing in a lovely glass press. “Did you see Roxy, Jane?”

Dirk frowned, cutting his eyes between the two women, and then to Dave, who gave him a shrug that said, “What, you think I can keep up with these shenanigans?”

“I did,” Jane said slowly. “How did you know I would find her?”

Rose waved a hand dismissively. “I had no idea you would, honestly. Seeing around Roxy is about as easy as breathing underwater for me. But I hoped.”

Jane snorted in a half-amused, half-exhausted way. “Well, are you sure you’re not a Hope Aspect? It certainly worked. And she was very honest with me, thank goodness.”

“About what?” Dave asked.

“About a lot of things, but there are many cats out of the proverbial bag. I know you’ve all been in cahoots for some time now, and I know the goal is to kill my mother.”

Rose carefully arranged her dangling sleeves and reached forward calmly, pressing down the coffee grounds to the bottom of the carafe, then, using one hand to hold the sleeves in place, poured each of them a glass. Dirk wasn’t sure he really wanted the buzz of energy that came from the beverage, because he was already humming with anxiety about the fact that Jane just casually mentioned knowing about the conspiracy to commit treason.

But when the High Priestess personally brews and pours your cup of coffee, you drink it.

Once everyone had their cup, Rose leaned back in her chair, bringing her own to her lips and blowing gently on the liquid, her eyes flicking upward to Jane. “And?” she prodded gently.

Jane’s fingernail tapped against the side of her cup, clicking a quick beat that at least made Dirk feel like he wasn’t the only one about to die from anxiety. “And. Were you aware there was an Heir of Life born in this most recent wave of ectobiological children?”

Dirk choked on his sip of coffee. That had not been the direction he had expected this conversation to head.

“I was,” Rose said. “Though I have told no one.”

“No shit,” Dave muttered bitterly. “Holding out on me, Rose?”

“You don’t have the best record when it comes to keeping your mouth shut, Dave,” she answered serenely, taking a sip of coffee.

“Whoa, what, that’s not even kind of true. Secrets go to me to die lonely deaths in barren graveyards, Rose, when have I ever—”

Rose cleared her throat, then adopted a wide-eyed, somewhat dopey expression and said in a deep voice clearly meant to be Dave, “Oh shit, Dirk, these glasses make me as invisible as Roxy!”

Dirk and Jane gave incredulous chuckles as Dave groaned. “No, look, Rose, that’s not the same thing.”

Rose rolled her eyes and cut him off before he could get started explaining how that was different. “Spare us the details, Dave. I didn’t tell you because it was made explicit to me that Jane had to learn this knowledge in a very particular way, and knowledge has a way of moving in the world that cannot be controlled once it is spoken aloud.”

Dave muttered some things about “psychic babble” but did not press the matter.

Rose shook her head and turned back to Jane. “So, the Heir of Life?”

“I think Mother intends to kill either him or me,” she said, once again firmly derailing the conversation from the direction Dirk expected.

“I think so, too,” Rose murmured sadly, a compassionate frown on her features as Jane drew a shuddering breath at her words.

“I don’t want to die,” Jane said, sounding as if she were testing the words out. “And I don’t want this baby to die.” She faltered, looking up into Rose’s intent gaze for a second before her eyes flickered away. “But,” she whispered, “I don’t want my mother to die, either.”

Dirk shifted uneasily.

“Dirk?” Rose asked, turning the intensity of her gaze to him.

He carefully set his coffee on a coaster in front of him, thinking about his words carefully before speaking. “Look. Betty has slowly been choking the life out of your empire, Jane. She has turned all that the Life Aspect stands for on its head, taking the… incredible power granted to you and your caste, and manipulating it to benefit only herself. I don’t understand how you can still defend her now, after everything.”

The Inheritor drew herself up, turning an angry glare on him. “How dare you speak to me like that,” she snapped.

“Like what? Like a man who has been working for years to manage your mother’s terrible policies to try to keep the Earthstuck alive? Like the Seat of Spirit, whose job it is to be your mother’s presence on Earth? You may have a great deal of influence over the, what, half a million residents of Skaia? Perhaps the one and a half million citizens of the Floating Isles look to you as their leader, but the nine million people of Earth look to _me_ to shield them from the shit that falls from your gilded home. I have spent my entire life, from the time I was eight years old and knew it would fall to me to rule Earth, doing whatever I could to deter the corruption that Betty oozes from ruining my home, and the lives of every Earthstuck person.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So, I beg your pardon, your _Highness_ , if you don’t like it when I tell you that your choice to defend the Empress is detestable.”

Practically vibrating with anger, he picked up his coffee and tried to be cool about the fact that everyone was staring at him, but then another thought occurred to him and he set the cup down again harder than was necessary. (It didn’t break, thank god.)

“And you know what? I don’t care if you never get on board.” Dave was on his feet in an instant as suddenly there was another Dirk, and another, and another, in the room. Jane and Rose drew back with mirrored expressions of shock and fear. “I will not leave Skaia until either Betty is dead, or I am, and if you’re going to have me executed for that, you’ll have to catch all of me, first.”

There was a long, tense moment where the various Dirks stared down the others, then Dave made a show of rolling his eyes. “Holy shit, dude, please be more melodramatic about it.” The Knight’s tone was like a thin layer of cotton hiding sharp steel poised to strike. Dirk snapped his splinters together and turned to look at Dave, who actually started to laugh as he took his hand off his sword hilt. “Making ultimatums and solemn vows, showing off your Heart shit. Does that trick work for you often?”

Dirk thought about the last time he had used his splinters to threaten someone to get his way, an eight year old with a knife to his own throat, and couldn’t share Dave’s mirth.

Rose didn’t, either. “So that’s what Roxy meant,” she breathed, eyes still wide. She leaned forward, now squinting at Dirk, her eyes vaguely unfocused in a way that made him distinctly uneasy. “A Prince of Heart shatters souls,” she said in an odd monotone, “what happens when he shatters his own?” 

Her pupils dilated suddenly, and she shuddered, but her eyes never left Dirk’s face and her odd tone never changed. “He learned to do it as a child,” she hissed, and he reeled back as if slapped. Dave started to move toward her, but her hand shot out to stop him, still without looking away from Dirk. “He lost himself twice, all for the girls, his sisters, his only loves, but since then he makes it worse, makes it brittle, like desiccated wood put over a fire, like a dare fueled by self-hatred, how long until it cannot be put together again—”

She was like a spring being coiled and wound, tighter and tighter, and finally she snapped, recoiling into herself hard, the hand that had been stopping Dave now reaching for him desperately. He was there in a flash, grabbing her hand with one of his own, the other wrapping around her shoulders and gently easing her back into her seat, shielding her body from Jane and Dirk’s gaping stares with his shoulders.

So they turned to stare at each other instead.

Dirk looked away first. “Sorry, Jane,” he said.

“Me, too,” she whispered.

Of course, this was the moment that Jake English chose to burst into the room, trailed by several Light Guards who had clearly been trying to prevent him from barging in on the High Priestess’s private meeting with the Inheritor and Seat of Spirit. But if anyone could evade determined guards just by _needing_ to see Rose, it was the Page of Hope.

Dave waved the guards away as Dirk sprang to his feet, rushing to Jake’s side. Jake was out of breath, looking quite ragged. Dirk braced him, hands on his elbows to give him support, and after a few seconds of heaving breaths, Jake’s face cleared and he threw himself into Dirk’s arms.

“Thank god, thank god,” he practically sobbed. “I was so worried about you, I didn’t know if I would make it in time—” and then he grabbed the Prince’s face and pressed a frantic kiss to his lips.

Jane made a strangled sound. As if remembering they weren’t alone, Jake jumped back and turned to face the Maid, but he didn’t quite let go of Dirk’s hands. He ended up looking a bit like a guilty child trying to hide something naughty behind his back.

“Er, hello there, Jane, dear gal,” he said, and Dirk could practically hear the gears grinding in his head as he tried to piece together what was going on. Jane just stared at him flatly.

“Jake,” Dave interrupted. “What are you doing here? What did you mean, you weren’t sure you would make it in time?”

Jake’s grip on Dirk’s hand tightened and he took a little step back, closer to Dirk as if seeking reassurance from the Prince’s presence. “Well,” he stalled, licking his lips and glancing again at Jane uncertainly, “I don’t know if I should….”

“Oh, just say it, Jake,” Jane said in exasperation, throwing her hands into the air in defeat. “It’s not like my world has been turned upside down five times already today. What else could possibly be happening?”

“Um,” Jake said, looking from Rose, to Dave, to Dirk pleadingly.

“She knows,” Dirk murmured.

“Well, okay then,” Jake sighed, the tension spilling out of him. He sagged tiredly, and let Dirk wrap an arm around his waist and lead him to the couch, where they sat down together. Jane’s eye followed them sharply the entire time. “The Empress,” he started, looking up apologetically at Jane. “She… she has gathered the Midnight Crew and marches on the Palace of Light.”

Who was most shocked at his news was an impossible contest to judge.

“What?” Rose breathed.

“She said something about you harboring fugitives, your Holiness, and plotting against her. Plumb well accused you of treason!”

“Dave,” Rose said, but the Knight of Time was halfway to the door already.

“On it!” he yelled, disappearing.

“Tell me what happened,” Rose commanded. 

“I wasn’t supposed to be back on Skaia,” Jake said, looking at Jane again with another apology. “But I noticed yesterday that there was a sudden influx of Noble Aspects coming through the main shuttle station in the capital city.” Dread gnawed at Dirk’s stomach. The last time Noble Aspects had come to Earth, to his knowledge, was to kill Callie. Why was the Empress sending them now? “I thought something might have gone remiss up here, so I sneaked away this morning and took the first cargo shuttle back to Skaia. I thought, if nothing else, Dirk would want to know that her Majesty had sent troops into his city.”

“Fuckin’ right I want to know,” Dirk growled. Jake patted his hand.

“But when I got here,” Jake continued, “and I tried to go to the palace to see Jane and Dirk, I saw Jack Noir and his whole Crew, all sixty or so of them gathered outside. I asked someone what was happening and she told me that Betty had announced that Rose was a traitor and harboring fugitives, and then I started running here.”

“Am I the fugitive?” Dirk asked, confused. “Or does she think Roxy is here?”

Rose shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “I think she’s talking about the children I’ve been sheltering from her.”

“Children?” Jane asked sharply.

“Rejects from the Midnight Crew conversion process,” Rose said, and Jane’s skin grayed. “Made mute by Betty’s corruption on their souls. I wasn’t sure the other day, but had a hunch that the Midnight Crew members who came to search for Roxy might have caught on. I wonder if they have some kind of ability to sense when other Midnight Crew members are nearby? It would explain how they know.”

“They do,” Jane confirmed, pretty features drawn and angry. “Those children are not fugitives, they’re supposed to be taken care of in the orphanages!”

“And yet, they inevitably die at those orphanages,” Rose snapped. Jane shrank back, eyes wide. “Another of Betty’s innumerable virtues, her penchant for hunting and killing children who are risks to her! Enough talk. Jane, you don’t have to be with us, but if you’re not, I hope very much that you are not against us.”

“I….” Jane looked truly miserable.

Rose didn’t wait for her reply. “Jake, I need you to go to Jade’s ectobiology lab, and bring her, Roxy, and John back. Quickly!”

Jake jumped to his feet and stopped just long enough to pull Dirk up and kiss him again. “Be safe,” he whispered, eyes admonishing. “If you get yourself hurt, I’ll never forgive you!”

Dirk chuckled and kissed him again, then shoved him toward the door. Jake disappeared through it at a run.

“Jane, perhaps you can stay with the children,” Rose said. “Keep them calm and safe.”

“I—yes, yes of course.” Jane rose to her feet and squared off with Dirk. “I don’t know what to think of all of this,” she said quietly, “but… if it must be this way, then don’t let it be you I’m grieving at the end of this.”

He nodded curtly. “Your servant, Maid Crocker,” he murmured, bowing at the waist.

Rose gave Jane hurried instructions to find a place she called ‘Can Town,’ and the Inheritor was gone.

This left Dirk and Rose together, the Seer watching the Prince carefully, the Prince looking anywhere but the Seer.

“How often do you fracture your own soul, Dirk?” she asked, voice as direct and cool as her gaze.

Dirk did not answer.

“You do realize that as a Prince, your ability revolves around the destruction of your Aspect?” she prodded. “Meaning what you can do to souls is inherently bad for them?”

“Don’t we have to help?” he grumbled, starting for the door.

“There’s enough time for this,” she snapped, and he fell silent and still again. “Dirk Strider, what I See when I turn my sight to you is a soul that you have torn to shreds and stitched together too many times to count.”

“But it’s stitched together.”

“For now,” Rose conceded. “Mostly. The Prince Class is meant to destroy outward, Dirk, not inward. Just as the Sylph Class is meant to heal outward, not inward. What you are doing with your power is as blasphemous and ruinous as what Betty does with hers.”

 _That_ stung like a slap across the face. Dirk had sensed Betty’s soul, the way that her Aspect had turned in on itself into something ugly and dangerous. He wondered if other Heart Aspects sensed his soul the same way he sensed others’, and saw the same ugliness and danger.

“So what? It’s better to splinter and kill others? To destroy their souls instead of mine?”

“No,” Rose replied evenly, not letting him rile her up. “Not morally. But in a more mystical sense, yes. And given our current situation and the poor odds we have of defeating the Empress, definitely. To kill one in the service of saving many is a philosophical good I am sure you are familiar with.”

“Right,” he muttered. “Fine. So are we just hanging back so you can lecture me on utilitarianism or are we waiting for something else?”

“We are waiting for Daves.”

Dirk waited for her to continue, but when she didn’t he raised his eyebrows. “Dave’s what? Dave’s signal?”

Rose smiled knowingly. “Sure, you could say that.”

Between the anxiety, the coffee, and the surge of adrenaline that had come with Jake’s news of Betty’s attack, Dirk buzzed with the need to be _doing_ something instead of playing word games with the Seer. He paced the room, glancing at the door impatiently.

Finally, Dave reappeared. He was carrying an armful of swords and armor, straining under the weight of the heap of metal. He dumped his load carefully on the floor, separating out the swords from some light chainmail and plate armor.

“Roxy said you prefer swords, but not what kind, so I just brought a few for you to pick from,” he explained to Dirk, who was already poking through the pile interestedly. 

Then the door opened and another Dave entered, carrying a much lighter load of similar content, though this Dave also had some kind of clothing folded up in his arms.

The first Dave nodded to the second Dave and said, “Three.”

The second Dave nodded to the first Dave and said, “Five.”

Dirk did not understand this exchange. He stared between the two Daves, who didn’t seem to care even a little bit that there were two of them. Him. Him...selves?

“Time travel,” Rose explained dispassionately to Dirk, even as she accepted the clothing from the second Dave and began to disrobe. 

Dirk gaped. “Splinters?” he said, wincing at himself. Nice one, bro, really eloquently stated.

Rose shook her head and said, “No. You make copies of yourself by splintering your soul. Dave is fully Dave each time, living out the same few minutes multiple times.” 

She untied the last of the ribbons keeping her outfit together and let the fancy, voluminous robes fall to the floor. Dirk’s gape did not go away. Sure, he _knew_ Rose was just another person, but like. Come on. Seeing the _High Priestess_ , the very highest possible caste and Class combination, in her underwear like a normal, average woman, was disconcerting.

Dave handed her the other set of robes, then smirked at Dirk’s face. “My god!” he exclaimed mockingly. “The Seer is a woman!”

Dirk felt his face heat up and looked away quickly, back to the pile of swords. He chose one and tested its weight.

The first Dave nodded again and said, “I better go.”

The second Dave said, “Watch out for four, you’re gonna need to stabilize him.” Rose and the first Dave both stopped at this and gave Dave flat, unhappy looks. Dave shrugged. “Just letting you know, man.”

 

Dave sighed and left, leaving Rose, Dirk, and Dave to continue arming themselves.

Once Dirk had selected a sword, he let Dave assist him with the light armor. It wasn’t much, just light chain mail over his chest, shoulder plates, gauntlets, and grieves. Enough protection that a stray blow or bullet might not kill him.

Rose now wore a fitted yellow tunic with her blazing Seer eye on its front over orange leggings and sturdy boots. Over this, Dave fitted her with armor similar to Dirk’s but even lighter and with an ornate, crownlike helmet. She brandished needle-like daggers.

Another Dave entered.

The Dave who had brought Rose’s armor said, “Five.”

The new Dave said, “Eight,” then turned to Rose. “The Guard is ready,” he told her as she carefully hung her needles in her chainmail, which had specially designed hooks for them on each hip.

“Let’s go,” she said.

The Dave who had now said “five” twice stayed behind and Rose and Dirk followed the newer Dave out of the room.

As they came to the front of the building, Dirk saw another Dave leading Roxy, John, Jade, and Jake to Rose.

“Eight,” Dirk’s Dave said with a casual wave, as though he knew what to expect from this Dave already.

“Seven,” the other Dave said.

“Best go see to the guard,” Dave 8 said. “I’ve got this.”

Dave 7 nodded, and disappeared without moving.

Meanwhile, Dirk had reached out to Roxy and pulled her in for a hug. Armored as he was, he had to be careful not to crush her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Much better now that I’m not in that stinking hole!” she said. He let her go and looked up as another Dave approached.

“God damn,” Roxy muttered. “How many of them are there?”

Dirk shook his head and watched as 8 greeted this new Dave, who identified as 11.

Dave 11 said, “Roxy, I think we should set you up in a sniper’s nest. I have a rifle ready for you.”

“Yes!” she agreed excitedly. “I have been waiting for you to say that since I was _born_ , baby!”

 _Another_ Dave approached. After they did their number ritual (the new Dave was 14), Dave 8 was sent on his way (undoubtedly to become Dave 9; Dirk had caught on by now). Dave 14 handed Dave 11 some kind of food.

“Jade, I’d like you to go to Can Town. Jane is there, and she will need your help if she is discovered. And if we lose this fight, it would be better for the future of Skaia if Betty did not know of your involvement.”

Jade was clearly unhappy about being sat out of the fight, but she didn’t argue, just left to join Jane in ‘Can Town.’ John was already armed with a warhammer. It was too late for him to pretend not to be balls deep in this, so he was staying with Rose. Dave 11 finished his snack and gestured for Roxy to follow him to the sniper’s nest, deep in discussion about the best strategies for covering Rose. The group dwindled.

Rose was busy talking to Dave 14 and a few other Light Guard commanders, so Dirk turned to Jake, who was fidgeting nervously with a pistol. They were out in the open, so he restrained himself to just a gentle brush of his hand on Jake’s shoulder.

Jake looked up at him, green eyes wide with fear. He laughed nervously at the look of concern on Dirk’s face and said, “No need to worry, chap! I’m ready for anything!”

Dirk smiled. “Alright,” he agreed easily, not wanting to make Jake feel embarrassed by pointing out how obviously _not_ okay he was. “You could go with Jade and help her and Jane protect the kids,” he suggested.

Jake bit his lip. “I don’t know, Strider,” he said, glancing to Rose and Dave, then back to Dirk. “I want to help!”

“You _are_ helping, Jade and Jane have a lot to handle with the kids. A third set of eyes and another gun would make us all feel more at ease. Besides, Rose has the entire Light Guard, and me. Jane should have more than just one guard.”

Jake looked a little relieved as he nodded. He turned to head to Can Town, then stopped, his facade dropping as he reached out and gripped Dirk’s hand tightly. “It won’t be much,” he said quietly, “but with every ounce of Hope I can muster, I’ll be hoping for your safety and success.”

Dirk pressed his lips to Jake’s knuckles. “See you soon, English.”

After Jake disappeared, Dirk turned back to Rose and Dave (whether this was still 14 or another Dave, Dirk wasn’t sure; turn your back for a minute and who knows how many Daves had come or gone).

When Dirk joined Rose and Dave, the three of them exchanged silent looks, and then Rose nodded. She took a deep breath, accepted Dave’s hand for a quick squeeze of reassurance, and then gestured for the guards to open the grand entry doors to the palace.

The three stepped into the sunlight, Dave and Dirk flanking Rose, and looked over the spread of Light Guards, armed and still in the sunlight.

On the other side, some hundred feet away, Betty Crocker stood tall and proud before the wave of Midnight Crew at her back.

Silence fell as the High Priestess and Empress locked eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shit is getting soooo real. Lots to do next chapter!
> 
> Comments? I love them!


	13. Reckoning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uh yeah violence and blood ahead. and maybe someone vomits. you were warned.

From her perch in the sniper’s nest, Roxy could see the entire plaza stretching out in front of Rose’s palace, on which the Light Guard and Midnight Crew were assembled, facing off.

Her rifle—a more advanced firearm than she had ever handled before, provided by Dave—had an excellent scope with multiple light-bending lenses that brought her targets right to her eye. But Roxy had been left with firm instructions from the Knight of Time to only start sniping if (or when) a battle actually started. He had also told her to focus her efforts on picking off direct threats to Rose, but Roxy was less inclined to take that order seriously. She could do mega damage from up here, and Rose had a whole Guard protecting her, and even a few priests who wore battle gear nervously.

More useful than the scope right now was a pair of what Dave had called binoculars. These were essentially two sniper scopes connected together that Roxy could hold up to her eyes and see some of the scene below in greater detail. She could even use a rolling dial to focus the lenses on different distances, and for now had zoomed out as far as possible to see as much of the soon-to-be-battlefield as possible.

She couldn’t hear, but she saw Betty laugh at something Rose had said, clearly dismissing some kind of offer. Roxy left the negotiations to her Seer sis and focused on studying the Midnight Crew. There was Jack, standing at Betty’s right shoulder, grinning with anticipation and fingering some wicked knives far too fondly. Ew.

Some of the crew looked familiar from her time as Jane’s bodyguard, but many were unknown to her. She scanned their faces, surprised by how many new ones were here. Jane and Rose had told her separately and explicitly about how hard it was to maintain the numbers of the Midnight Crew, due to the difficult and dangerous conversion process as well as the fact that many Crew members died young. So where had all the new faces come from?

Her scanning paused on a face that looked familiar, in the ranks of Betty’s Crew.

Huh. She zoomed in. Well, that sure looked like that one guy, what was his name… Bryan? Or Byron? Fuck she sucked at remembering names, but for real she was sure this was Bryson and he was definitely not a Midnight Crew member. He had been a Thief of Time bureaucrat (god _damn_ bureaucrats, she knew she hated them for a reason!) who had hung around her and John and Jane some.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, clenching the binoculars closer. “That little snake.”

He _had_ to have been spying on them for Betty. Roxy remembered him because he had used his Thief of Time abilities around her once, stealing time from her and John but not telling her for what purpose. He had seemed so simple and innocent, but… what had he stolen from them? Fuck.

A gunshot rang out and she let out a yelp of surprise. So focused on Baron, she had forgotten that a fucking battle was about to break out.

And break out it did. Midnight Crew members rushed the Light Guard, whose Aspect powers started to bend reality around them, wind storms and people teleporting around and moving too fast and flashes of what looked like lightning. Holy gods of the farthest realm, she had never seen such a scene.

She expected the Midnight Crew to be demolished under the onslaught of Breath, Time, Space, and Light powers (if Hope was in play, Roxy couldn’t identify it as easily). Yet more than half of the attacks seemed to simply not affect the Crew members. Physical attacks, like Time or Space Aspects using their abilities to hurl things or themselves, were working. But Breath and Light attacks seemed to simply vanish upon contact.

She caught sight of Dirk slicing down a Midnight Crew member who got too close to Rose, and remembered her job.

She switched to her rifle scope and scanned for a clean shot.

She found one, and _CRACK_ took it.

The Crew member fell. Bull’s eye, bitches.

She scanned. Shot. Scanned. Shot.

Hells. Yes. She was gonna take them out before they knew what was happening.

Except. That was… that was the woman she had just killed. Alive and fine.

“Oh, fuck,” she whispered, and shot the woman again, then quickly switched to her binoculars to observe.

The woman had fallen under her gunshot, instantly dead, and by the time Roxy found her again with the binoculars, a strange green glow surrounded the gunshot, and then… she was back on her feet.

Life powers. Betty’s Life powers. But… how? Betty was on the other side of the plaza, focused on an onslaught from a group of Light Guards and what looked to be a small cadre of battling priests.

Roxy took a shot at Betty, watching as the bullet buried itself in her forehead. Betty’s mouth formed the word “ow” under her scope. That was it. That was the whole extent of her reaction to getting _shot in the head._

“Christ,” Roxy cursed. Her sniper’s perch would do them no good at all without taking the Empress out first. Somehow she was healing herself and the entire Midnight Crew—

The Crew. Could it be… _just_ the Crew that she could heal like that? Roxy looked for the Thief of Time and found him facing down a Light Guard.

_CRACK_

He fell.

She watched. No green light came to his aid.

“Yes!” Apparently the fake Crew members were not connected to Betty’s powers.

Okay, now she just had to try to figure out who was incognito and who was actually Midnight Crew. She used the binoculars to watch for any signs of a black-clad soldier using Aspect powers. She picked off two more Aspect fighters before growing frustrated. This was too slow, too ineffective.

She scanned again for Dirk just in time to see him square off with Jack.

“Oh, god,” she murmured, sick to her stomach with fear for him. Jack couldn’t be killed; Betty would just heal any wounds he suffered. Dirk was a skilled fighter, but nobody could beat an invincible enemy.

She didn’t hesitate before dropping her rifle and scrambling down from her post.

Halfway down, she ran into a Dave.

“They can’t be killed!” she yelled at the same time he said, “They’re fucking invincible!”

“Does anyone else know?” she asked frantically, clutching at his arm as he doubled over panting, clearly exhausted.

“Not yet, I just figured it out after something like eighteen times living through this fucking battle. I came to get you. A past me should be telling Rose right about now.”

“Dirk is fighting Jack by himself,” Roxy said, already moving past Dave and running for the plaza.

“What are you going to do?” Dave yelled after her.

“Anything!” she shouted over her shoulder.

Upon opening the door to the plaza, the sound of the battle became deafening. From the sniper’s nest, it had been a distant din, but on the ground it was disorienting, an assault all on its own. Roxy covered her ears, looking across the now-bloody plaza, delirious with worry for Dirk.

She spotted the back of his blond head and looked past him to Jack, who was fighting with two long daggers, or short swords. Hard to tell from here. She took off running for them.

She tripped on the body of Brandon the bureaucrat and fell right next to him, staring into his lifeless eyes. Oh god. Oh holy god. She had fucking killed this man. From the sniper’s nest it had seemed so clinical but here she could see the stubble on his chin, the way his brown eyes had little yellow flecks in them, the trail of blood dripping down his forehead where the bullet had struck him. Her bullet, fired by her finger, from her gun.

Roxy vomited.

There wasn't time for this. _Get up, Roxy, get UP!_ Dirk. She had to get to Dirk. She had to warn him, help him.

She shoved herself up, wiping drunkenly at her mouth and eyes, and staggered toward where she had last spotted her best friend.

She saw him run Jack through with his sword, a clean and mortal blow to the Midnight Crew captain’s heart.

He pulled his sword out and turned his back as Jack crumpled, dead.

“No!” Roxy screamed, shoving past a Light Guard who got in her way.

Dirk heard her, looked up with surprise. Their eyes met.

“Dirk! Behind you!” she screamed hysterically, running as fast as she could, but she wasn’t fast enough.

Jack loomed behind him. His short sword came up. His arm swung.

“No, no, no,” Roxy was repeating hysterically, but it didn’t matter. She stopped in her tracks and saw the surprised look on Dirk’s face as the sword connected with his neck from behind.

The scream that ripped from Roxy’s throat as Dirk’s head toppled to the ground, separate from his body, mingled with the sounds of battle all around her, lost in the fray of human misery and violence.

Her vision tunneled on Dirk and she staggered forward again until she was next to his body. She fell to her knees, and her hands flew to him, touching desperately, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, how she could fix it, she had to fix it, oh god, she had to fix _him_. Blood was getting all over her, but she didn't care, just kept searching his body as if for a key that would repair him. How. Where. What did she have to do, how did she _fix him._

Firm hands on her shoulders.

She screamed, “No!” and struggled as she was pulled away, wordlessly screeching and flailing, trying desperately to get back to Dirk.

But the hands belonged to somebody strong, far stronger than her, and they pulled and held and gripped and she _couldn’t get to Dirk_.

“Roxy! Stop fighting me!”

Dave. Dave was holding her.

She slumped in his arms, her back pressed to his chest, eyes glued to Dirk. He held her tightly around her middle and he was talking but she didn’t hear anything he was saying, just closed her eyes and sobbed, no energy left to try to fight or even comprehend.

He turned her around, still talking, and she was just putty. He was supporting all of her weight and she didn’t know, didn’t care, just kept muttering and sobbing, Dirk was gone, he was dead, what were they going to do, what was _she going to do_.

A new voice. A different voice. A voice she should know but she didn’t care, it didn’t matter.

“Let me,” this voice said, and Dave’s arms shifted so that he now gripped her by the elbows, and she was being bodily passed from Dave to a different person.

“Roxy,” the person said. “Roxy, it’s okay, I’m okay.”

“No,” she said, curling against his chest instinctively. “No, you’re dead.”

He actually chuckled. “Roxy.”

She looked up and it was Dirk, but his head was attached to his neck so it couldn’t be Dirk.

“Come on,” he said, gentle and soft and perfect. “The battle’s not done.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Roxy!” he said, more sharply. “Get a grip! I’m okay.”

It was starting to sink in. He was… okay?

“I saw you get decapitated,” she said in a monotone.

He eased her around so that she was facing… Jane Crocker.

A very sick looking Jane Crocker, in fact, whose blue eyes were wide with shock and fear, and who was trembling visibly as she met Roxy’s disbelieving eyes.

“Lucky for us, we have a time traveler and a fucking miracle worker on our side,” Dirk said.

“Janey?” Roxy whispered. “You… you saved him? You brought him back?”

The Inheritor nodded, took something from her pocket and held it out toward Roxy. Roxy looked. It was a seed, withered and devoid of life, and then it grew and was a flower.

Roxy launched herself at Jane, who caught her, and for a minute their embrace was the only thing holding either one of them up.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and kissed Jane’s cheek over and over. “Thank you.”

“Ladies, this is touching,” Dave cut in. “But we really have to move.”

Under Dirk and Dave’s watchful eyes, the four retreated to a more defensible position. Jane looked around at the fallen Light Guards. “I have to help them,” she said.

“Betty first. We don’t have time to worry about anything else,” Dave said firmly. “Hopefully once we’re done with her, you’ll still be able to bring these people back, but we’re going to need all hands on deck to take out the Empress.”

“How do we take her out? I shot her in the head and she survived.”

“We’ve got to try Dirk’s powers,” Dave answered. “It’s why Rose brought him here, and Rose knows shit. It wasn’t a coincidence that she wanted Dirk here for this battle.”

They turned to face Dirk. He licked his lips, nodded. “I need to be closer,” he said.

 

“I’ll distract Jack,” Dave was saying under the cover of a void bubble. Luckily, the Midnight Crew was far too occupied to really notice the stench of Void enough to track it and do something about it, so as long as they kept moving, they were hidden from enemy forces. They were making their way slowly to Betty, who was standing apart from the battle and barking orders. Jack was near her, stabbing anything that got too close.

“Dirk, you have to splinter her, separate her from the ability to use her Life powers,” Dave continued.

“I don’t know if I can do that,” replied the Prince uncertainly.

“No time like the present to learn,” Dave said sharply, and Dirk gave a curt nod. “Jane, stay close to Roxy. Stay hidden, you two. We can’t risk you dying, Jane. You’re the only hope for us after this mess is over for a peaceful transition of power, okay?”

Jane looked at Roxy, back to Dave. Nodded.

“Let’s do it,” Dirk said, and he and Dave bumped fists and then took off, leaving the protection of the void bubble.

Jack howled in anger upon seeing Dirk, but there were suddenly three Daves upon him, and he was forced to focus on the more immediate threat of the Knights’ blades. Roxy and Jane moved out of the way, closer to Betty and Dirk, to avoid the fight.

“Jack said you were dead,” Betty spat at Dirk.

“Surprise, bitch,” Dirk said flatly.

“He said he cut your head off. Only one way you come back from that. I knew that ungrateful brat was in on this,” Betty said, more to herself than to Dirk. She seemed utterly unconcerned about the Prince, sure in her Aspect-granted invulnerability. “Should have offed that pathetic little Maid a long time ago.”

Jane gripped Roxy’s hand tightly. Roxy squeezed back.

And then... _something_ … happened to Betty.

She blurred, managed to look surprised for a second before letting out a gasp of pain. She was vibrating intensely, so fast that she actually seemed to be in multiple positions at once. No… she _was_ in multiple positions. Even as Roxy and Jane watched, Betty seemed to separate out into three distinct people.

Roxy looked to Dirk, saw his whole body tensed up and rigid with effort. Blood trickled from his nose and his eyes were squinted, his lips curled back in a snarl of concentration.

Betty made a noise that sounded like an angry wounded animal, her three selves howling in unison. None of the three of them could move; they all just stood there in identical poses of shaking pain and rage.

But Dirk was frozen in place, too, unable to move as he held the fragments of Betty apart from each other. Green light was lashing frantically around the splinters, trying desperately to reunite the three pieces of Betty and healing her as fast as Dirk’s princely powers could damage her.

“We have to help!” Roxy said.

Jane swallowed visibly, eyes hardening with resolve.

The void bubble dropped. Roxy was trying to figure out where to get a weapon, looking around for a fallen sword or gun, when she heard a bloodcurdling sound and snapped her attention back to Betty.

Jane was standing before her mother, and the green Life force that bled from Betty and had been fighting Dirk’s attack was leaking into the Maid. The splinters of Betty writhed as Dirk’s attack became more effective. Jane kept sucking the Life power into her, siphoning it off and preventing it from healing the Empress. Jane was straining with the effort; like Dirk, she was giving everything she had to her Aspect ability. But it wasn't enough. Betty wouldn't die from this, not yet. The key ingredient was still missing.

“Roxy!” Dirk gasped out. “My sword!”

Roxy sprang into action. She pulled Dirk’s sword from its scabbard and charged Betty.

One clean hit to the leftmost splinter and Betty shrieked again, the splinter falling to the ground. When Roxy had seen Dirk’s splinters attacked when they had been children, he had always snapped back together; now, he was able to hold Betty’s parts separate even as one piece of her died from the sword strike.

Another solid strike and the rightmost splinter fell, too.

The middle splinter, the core of Betty Crocker, stared at Roxy as she advanced.

Words came to mind, but none seemed adequate for the moment. Dramatic final words seemed empty as Roxy stared at the woman she had sworn to kill almost twenty years ago, whose demise had become the reason for Roxy to exist. Finally.

Roxy spat at the Empress’s feet and buried the sword in her heart.

Dirk let go of his Heart powers and collapsed to the ground even as Jane fell to her knees, emptied.

Dave landed a killing blow to Jack for the seventh time, and this time, Jack died.

Around them, Midnight Crew members who had become accustomed to taking mortal blows without fear began to fall under the attacks of Light Guards.

The battle was over in moments.

 

“Ready?” Roxy asked. Jane nodded.

They were standing next to a pile of corpses, the people Jane had identified among her mother’s soldiers as those most loyal to Betty. The ones who were too twisted beyond humanity to save.

And to the side of this pile, Betty herself. Dead.

Roxy reached to the Void and covered the corpses with it as thickly as possible, then nodded to Jane.

Jane closed her eyes, relaxed her body.

Life energy shot out of her in every direction, rippling out from her as if she were a stone dropped into a placid lake and Life the water around her. It traveled quickly, seeping itself into the bodies of Light Guards and Midnight Crew members alike, everyone on the plaza except those blotted out by Roxy’s void blanket.

Wounds stitched together. Limbs reattached. People awoke from death as if from a dream.

Jane collapsed, but Roxy was there to catch her. They left the Light Guard to sort out the disoriented throngs of revived people, and retreated with Rose, Dirk, and Dave to the Palace of Light.

Before they could get very far, Jake, Jade, and John found them.

Jake and Dirk reached for each other with desperate cries of relief. The rest of the group started their own circuits of relieved hugs and rushed explanations, but these were cut short by a bright white glow emanating from—

“Jake?” Dirk said, stepping back from the Page with wide eyes. “Are you okay?”

“Never better, mate!” he answered, voice loud and booming in an unnatural way. He sounded almost manic.

Rose stepped forward, placed a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Jake,” she said quite calmly, lavender eyes wide and dilated, voice flat. “Isn’t this marvelous?” she asked, and Roxy was decidedly creeped out by the contrast between her dead tone and her words.

Jake didn’t seem to share that feeling. He boomed a louder-than-life laugh. “It is, Rose! It is! It feels like anything is possible!”

“Wouldn’t it be lovely if all those poor souls twisted by Betty’s machinations were restored to their normal selves?”

“The Midnight Crew?” Jake asked, the white light around him expanding outward.

“Yes, the Midnight Crew. It’s just awful how their souls were butchered by the Empress,” Rose said, and she might as well have been talking about ants or raisins.

Jake threw his head back and laughed. “Well, Rose, anything is possible!” he said, and the white light around him wisped up and away in beautiful tendrils of Hope, curling and branching and dancing about as they made their way toward the huddled group of Midnight Crew prisoners.

“Tally ho!” Jake yelled.

White flashed so brightly everyone shaded their eyes, looking away.

When Roxy dared to open her eyes again, Jake and Rose were both unconscious and the white light was gone.

“Well,” Dave said with a huff as he stooped to gather Rose up. Dirk was similarly bending to tend to Jake. “Is that the last big act of heroism for the day? Jade? John? Anyone else need their time to shine, literally or figuratively? No? Thank fucking god.”

He stomped off toward the palace, Rose dangling limply in his arms.

Roxy wrapped her arm around Jane’s waist, taking some of the Maid’s weight, and together they staggered after him.

Dave led them straight to Rose’s rooms and gently laid Rose on her bed, removing her armor so she could rest comfortably. Dirk set Jake next to Rose, and after a minute, Jane climbed up and fell asleep next to him.

In the sitting room, Jade, John, and Dave leaned against each other in exhaustion. Roxy found Dirk sitting on a couch, his head in his hands.

She sat next to him, curled her feet up under her, and nudged under his arm until he was forced to put his arm around her shoulder to accommodate her.

“We did it,” she whispered.

“She’s really dead,” he agreed just as quietly, leaning back and settling in for mandatory bestie cuddles.

“Ding dong, the bitch is dead,” Roxy said.

“Which old bitch?” Dirk said, chuckling drily.

“The wicked bitch!” Roxy finished. It was an old, old joke between them, from their teenage years when they had made outlandish plans to kill Betty while lying together under the shadow of Skaia when they would skip class and dream of a better future.

“Well, it didn’t happen like we thought it would, did it?” Dirk said after a minute. “We probably planned a hundred different ways of killing her, and this was wilder and more unbelievable than any of them.”

“True,” Roxy agreed. “But either way, we’ve avenged Callie, so I’m fine with it.”

They said nothing for a minute, and then Roxy squeezed her arms around Dirk a little tighter.

“Do me a favor, bromo,” she said.

“Hm?” he asked sleepily.

“Hang on a little tighter to your head from now on. I like it better attached to your body.”

He snorted a laugh and agreed with a little hum. A pause, then he said, “Tomorrow we have to deal with Earth. Betty’s troops are still down there. Who knows what Caterina has had to deal with.”

“Is that her name?” Roxy asked. Vaguely she was aware of Dave getting up and heading into Rose’s room. Poor Dave. How was he still mobile? But someone had to handle the chaos of the battle aftermath, and after a minute he reappeared with an exhausted Jane in tow. No rest for the weary.

John and Jade followed them out at Jane’s request. She would need backup for what was to come. Once Rose and Jake were awake again, they would undoubtedly join her in handling the situation.

Roxy and Dirk, though, were Low Aspects. They didn’t belong on Skaia, didn’t fit in among these Nobles. Though both would have helped if Jane had asked, they knew that there was nothing they could do right now. The lowest Noble Aspect was still a higher caste than even Dirk; their presence would be seen as nothing but a nuisance. Perhaps other Nobles would even blame them for the violence of the day. No, this was not their place to step in. Not yet.

Today, Skaia was Jane’s problem. Tomorrow, Earth would be theirs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW. OKAY.
> 
> This is basically the end. But there will be an epilogue soon, so one more chapter.
> 
> I won't say goodbye yet because of that but, what a ride! Thanks for reading. See you soon for the final installment.
> 
> Comments! Please! I love them! :D :D :D


	14. Epilogue

It was the last day of Jane’s annual visit for the Earth festival known as Inheritance Day. Seven years since Betty had died, and this was the seventh time Jane had come to Earth for the holiday. The Earthstuck flocked to the capital city to watch their Empress and her Inheritor go by in a parade, waving, smiling. Her entourage never failed to include Jade and John, and every few years Dave even managed to make the trip.

Roxy and Dirk were in the parade, too, of course. The Seat of Spirit and his Shadow could hardly skip out on the day of celebration, even if both would have preferred a quieter day with their visiting Skaian friends. Then again, Roxy thrived on the attention, preening before the adoring masses. She was especially popular these days among the Corrupted castes. Void, Rage, and Doom parents brought her their children on a surprisingly regular basis for her blessings.

When the parade was over, there was a short gap of time before the group had to be present for the feast at Dirk’s palace. The majority of the city would take to the streets tonight in a revel, but at the Seat would be a more subdued celebration among Earth’s most influential citizens, and a few Skybound who chose to descend for the festival.

In the hours between parade and feast, a group of seven friends gathered. Jane, the Empress herself now, who had spent the years since her ascension tirelessly dismantling the her mother’s legacy. Jake, who had resigned his position as Jane’s ambassador in order to live on Earth with Dirk, only to take up Dirk’s request to be ambassador to Skaia. Jade, whose etobiological research was fast-tracking humanity back to more natural forms of reproduction. John, who had happily taken Jane’s offer to head her newly established Queen’s Guard. Dave, still the head of Rose’s Light Guard, who now worked closely with John to help him with his newfound duties as captain. It had been seven years and John had learned all of what he needed by now, but nobody said anything about their relationship and it didn’t change.

They poured a cup of tea for the absent Rose, stuck on Skaia. Given the now close relationship between the throne and the priesthood, Jane and Rose had long ago agreed that whenever the Empress had to be absent from Skaia, the High Priestess would actively manage the day-to-day ruling of the Empire. Barring certain extenuating circumstances, they had never both left the Isle at the same time, nor would they.

Dirk, who had reluctantly stayed on as governor of Earth at Jane’s request and Rose’s prodding. He had wanted to retire, leave the governing to someone else, but Jane had practically begged him to help her with the transition. Roxy wouldn’t leave if Dirk didn’t, obviously, so she had assumed her role once again as his second-in-command, his Shadow.

Inheritance Day marked the anniversary of Betty’s death and Jane’s assumption of the throne. For most on Earth, and even the majority of Skaians these days, it was a joyful holiday.

For Roxy and her crew of friends, it was a bittersweet reminder of the events leading up to her death. Hiding in caves, bitter betrayals, life and death on a holy plaza turned battlefield. 

Roxy and Dirk had also established a tradition, and it was to this the group tended now.

In Dirk’s private gardens, at the heart of the meandering paths and streams, was a small circle of cleared ground. In the middle, a quietly bubbling fountain surrounded by white roses.

Every year, Jane infused the roses with another dose of her Life power, and the bushes stayed healthy and blossoming year round regardless of the weather or availability of sunlight.

This year, the Maid of Life did her customary circle, then paused in front of the fountain.

“Callie,” she said. Behind her, Roxy linked her fingers into Dirk’s. “Muse of Space. Once again, I offer Life to your memory, since I cannot offer it to your body and soul. I wish I had known you, since Roxy has told me the most wonderful things about you. I am sure we would have been friends. I hope you are at peace.”

One by one, the other Nobles paid respects, silently or with murmured well wishes. Jake went last among them, then paused to hug Dirk closely and squeeze Roxy’s shoulder before leading the visitors away. Roxy and Dirk stood before the monument to their oldest friend, their sister, holding hands.

“Betty was right to fear Muses,” Roxy said.

“Why do you say that?”

“If it hadn’t been for Callie, perhaps the bitch would still be Empress. Callie is the reason we took up our batshit crusade, after all.”

“A self-fulfilling prophecy,” Dirk mused. On his face were perched a pair of triangular, dark-tinted spectacles similar to those Dave wore. They had been a gift from Dave, years ago after he had privately accepted Roxy’s enthusiastic granting of the last name Strider. Rose Lalonde and Dave Strider had families at last. “She feared a Muse would be her downfall, so she hunted Muses. And by so doing, sealed her fate.”

Roxy nodded, leaning her head against Dirk’s shoulder. “I still miss her all the time.”

“Me, too.”

“At least things are getting better,” Roxy said.

And they were. Jane had blown open the doors to the Skaian Isles, and now the Earthstuck and Skybound were free to move between the two realms. Of course, this had not cured the prejudices held by either society, and it was taking everything Jane and Dirk had to hold things together. Some people had adapted with great enthusiasm, Nobles moving their families to Earth, Light Aspect priests setting up earthly temples permanently, Low Aspects taking vacations and pilgrimages to Skaia.

Other things were not going as smoothly. The few Low Aspects who had tried to make homes on the Floating Isles encountered great difficulty finding places to live, jobs, and schools for their children. Jane had stepped in and made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of caste, and John and his group of Queen’s Guards had tried to enforce this. In theory, things were more equitable, but in practice, there was nothing the Guard could do about the hostile attitudes of Nobles that made the living conditions for Low Aspects on the Isles unbearable.

So they had taken up different, social means to try to combat tensions.

Jake and Dirk had gotten married, for example. For personal reasons, too, and love, clearly. But neither had been interested in getting married until Rose had pointed out that doing so could do a great deal to begin to subvert social stigma around inter-caste romance. Rose had officiated, descending to Earth for the ceremony, which had been attended by Jane as well (one of those extenuating circumstances). The ploy had been mildly successful; many Earthstuck who respected Dirk as their Seat had come around to his choice of partner, while others used the taboo relationship as another excuse to spew hatred and decry the social changes as evil and unnatural. 

On average, the Nobles were less impressed by this ploy; as Roxy had once observed years ago, Page of Hope was barely within the Noble range of castes, and it was easy for other, higher castes to dismiss his marriage to a Low Aspect as simply proving that he didn’t truly belong on Skaia in the first place.

Jane had adopted the Heir of Life, and John had more or less become a father figure to the child. In their care, he was happy, if doomed to be an insufferable prankster. He treated Roxy, Dirk, and Jake, like favored aunts and uncles every time he visited.

Signless servants had been given the option to leave the Floating Isles to make lives on Earth, which most had taken. Jane had seen to it that they were given restitutions with which to begin their new lives. Rose had declared the Signless to be favored by the gods, and what Jane’s social programs could not fix, Rose’s religious decrees worked to smooth out. In seven short years the Signless had gone from invisible slaves to revered prophets. As with all social change, this was not a perfect transition; violence had broken out more than once during the integration of Signless people into new communities.

Now it was more common for Low castes, mostly Blood and Mind, to commute to Skaia to work in servant positions. Massive construction projects had developed to make shuttle stations to accommodate the heavy flow of traffic between Earth and the Isles. Roxy had seen to it that the Corrupted caste quarters got the best new shuttle stations, which had brought jobs and businesses into their communities like a breath of life. Roxy introduced tax incentive programs to ensure that employers hired locals. It wasn’t perfect, but it was progress.

Jane had also funded an educational overhaul whose implementation Dirk had overseen, starting with the poorest school districts on Earth. Teachers were given raises, new schools were built, and exchange programs established to bring Low and Noble children together on Earth and the Isles. Jane had even enrolled her son in an exchange program to the Doom Quarter schools, where he would begin taking classes the next year. People had been shocked, but she had calmly explained that he would surely receive just as excellent an education in the Doom Quarter as on Skaia. (Privately, she and John were beside themselves with worry over sending the boy so far from home, though he would be commuting on a private shuttle daily.)

Caterina had taken up permanent residence on Skaia as one of Jane’s closest advisors. Jane loved the woman fiercely and sought her advice on social matters frequently, trusting her to bring gentle corrections when Jane’s old habits of thought blinded her to just decisions.

Scientists from all over the world were given free access to study the ectobiology labs, and advances in electric energy were on the verge of transforming all manner of daily matters. Roxy and Dirk had their own personal set of equipment for study, gifted to them (with much difficulty involving a great deal of Space manipulation) from the Dersite labs. They didn’t have a lot of time to tinker, given their responsibilities, but Dirk proved to be a regular genius at the wiring and mechanics, and Roxy’s notes on the genetic codes had provided the grounds for more than one breakthrough from Jade’s labs.

Seven years, and the Empire was radically transformed, with a long way to go still.

 

Roxy Lalonde lay in a field one late afternoon in the early autumn, some months after Jane had come for the festival, shirking her duties. The day was too beautiful to spend at the palace signing papers and approving budgets. Let the bureaucrats handle it. Dirk had it under control, he’d survive a day without her. He had Jake to help relieve his boredom now, anyway.

She gazed up at Skaia, which blotted out the sun and provided cool shade for her to relax in. Up there, her best sister Rose was probably bickering with Dave about being on time to some meeting or another. Her best friends Jane and John were probably welcoming their son home from his day at school on Earth. Somewhere in the labs, her favorite ectobiologist Jade was probably yawning and wrapping up another day of research, ready to go home and relax.

She lifted both hands up so that they were in her view, and cupped her hands together to form a little heart to frame the floating island. Tomorrow, she decided, she’d catch a shuttle and head up to Skaia for a few days to sleep under the full expanse of the stars in Jane’s personal garden before the weather got too chilly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so happy to have finished this up! I hope you enjoyed the ride; thank you so SO much to those of you who read, commented, and left kudos while this was in the process of updating. And to anyone who is reading now that it is (has been) finished, thank you! I hope you'll consider leaving a comment and kudos, as well; it really means a lot to me!
> 
> I have other additional thoughts about this world and the contents of the plot, things that Roxy and Dirk could not know but nevertheless shaped their lives. So if you have questions, leave them in the comments! I probably have an answer ready to go and I'd love to share. Any threads you think weren't tied up here, feel free to ask. I know I should probably use a tumblr for that, but... sigh. Tumblr is such a wonky platform and I don't need one more thing to obsess over.
> 
> So leave a comment! :D
> 
> See you soon. I'm a fic-writing fiend these days, there's already another (shorter) one finished and an other other one underway (jeez), not to mention I haven't abandoned Rebuild. It's so easy to get sucked in, you know?


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